The years from 1811 to 1815, when he went abroad for the second time, were passed by Irving in a sort of humble waiting on Providence.  His letters to Brevoort during this period are full of the ennui of irresolute youth.  He idled away weeks and months in indolent enjoyment in the country; he indulged his passion for the theatre when opportunity offered; and he began to be weary of a society which offered little stimulus to his mind.  His was the temperament of the artist, and America at that time had little to evoke or to satisfy the artistic feeling.  There were few pictures and no galleries; there was no music, except the amateur torture of strings which led the country dance, or the martial inflammation of fife and drum, or the sentimental dawdling here and there over the ancient harpsichord, with the songs of love, and the broad or pathetic staves and choruses of the convivial table; and there was no literary atmosphere.

After three months of indolent enjoyment in the winter and spring of 1811, Irving is complaining to Brevoort in June of the enervation of his social life:  “I do want most deplorably to apply my mind to something that will arouse and animate it; for at present it is very indolent and relaxed, and I find it very difficult to shake off the lethargy that enthralls it.  This makes me restless and dissatisfied with myself, and I am convinced I shall not feel comfortable and contented until my mind is fully employed.  Pleasure is but a transient stimulus, and leaves the mind more enfeebled than before.  Give me rugged toils, fierce disputation, wrangling controversy, harassing research,—­give me anything that calls forth the energies of the mind; but for Heaven’s sake shield me from those calms, those tranquil slumberings, those enervating triflings, those siren blandishments, that I have for some time indulged in, which lull the mind into complete inaction, which benumb its powers, and cost it such painful and humiliating struggles to regain its activity and independence!”

Irving at this time of life seemed always waiting by the pool for some angel to come and trouble the waters.  To his correspondent, who was in the wilds of Michilimackinac, he continues to lament his morbid inability.  The business in which his thriving brothers were engaged was the importation and sale of hardware and cutlery, and that spring his services were required at the “store.”  “By all the martyrs of Grub Street [he exclaims], I’d sooner live in a garret, and starve into the bargain, than follow so sordid, dusty, and soul-killing a way of life, though certain it would make me as rich as old Croesus, or John Jacob Astor himself!” The sparkle of society was no more agreeable to him than the rattle of cutlery.  “I have scarcely [he writes] seen anything of the ——­s since your departure; business and an amazing want of inclination have kept me from their threshold.  Jim, that sly poacher, however, prowls about there, and vitrifies his heart by the furnace of their charms.