and amusing essayists, authors of some of the airiest and most graceful contributions of the present century,—­and we owe them to the new impulse given to our literature in 1819.  I look abroad on these stars of our literary firmament,—­some crowded together with their minute points of light in a galaxy, some standing apart in glorious constellations; I recognize Arcturus and Orion and Perseus and the glittering jewels of the Southern Crown, and the Pleiades shedding sweet influences; but the Evening Star, the soft and serene light that glowed in their van, the precursor of them all, has sunk below the horizon.  The spheres, meanwhile, perform their appointed courses; the same motion which lifted them up to the mid-sky bears them onward to their setting; and they, too, like their bright leader, must soon be carried by it below the earth.”

Let me quote also Mr. Bryant’s closing remarks:—­

“Other hands will yet give the world a bolder, more vivid, and more exact portraiture.  In the mean time, when I consider for how many years he stood before the world as an author, with still increasing fame,—­half a century in this most changeful of centuries,—­I cannot hesitate to predict for him a deathless renown.  Since he began to write, empires have arisen and passed away; mighty captains have appeared on the stage of the world, performed their part, and been called to their account; wars have been fought and ended which have changed the destinies of the human race.  New arts have been invented and adopted, and have pushed the old out of use; the household economy of half mankind has undergone a revolution.  Science has learned a new dialect and forgotten the old; the chemist of 1807 would be a vain babbler among his brethren of the present day, and would in turn become bewildered in the attempt to understand them.  Nation utters speech to nation in words that pass from realm to realm with the speed of light.  Distant countries have been made neighbors; the Atlantic Ocean has become a narrow frith, and the Old World and the New shake hands across it; the East and the West look in at each other’s windows.  The new inventions bring new calamities, and men perish in crowds by the recoil of their own devices.  War has learned more frightful modes of havoc, and armed himself with deadlier weapons; armies are borne to the battle-field on the wings of the wind, and dashed against each other and destroyed with infinite bloodshed.  We grow giddy with this perpetual whirl of strange events, these rapid and ceaseless mutations; the earth seems to be reeling under our feet, and we turn to those who write like Irving for some assurance that we are still in the same world into which we were born; we read, and are quieted and consoled.  In his pages we see that the language of the heart never becomes obsolete; that Truth and Good and Beauty, the offspring of God, are not subject to the changes which beset the inventions of men.  We become satisfied that he whose works were the delight of our fathers, and are still ours, will be read with the same pleasure by those who come after us.”