’Oh! what are thousand living loves To that which can not quit the
     dead?’

The biographer observes that ’it is in the light of this event that we must interpret portions of ‘Rural Funerals,’ in the Sketch-Book, and ‘Saint Mark’s Eve,’ in Bracebridge Hull.’  From the former of these, we therefore make an extract, which is now so powerfully illustrated by the experience of its author: 

’The sorrow for the dead is the only sorrow from which we refuse to be divorced.  Every other wound we seek to heal; every other affliction to forget; but this wound we consider it a duty to keep open; this affliction we cherish and brood over in solitude.  Where is the mother that would willingly forget the infant that perished like a blossom from her arms, though every recollection is a pang?  Where is the child that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament?  Who in the hour of agony would forget the friend over whom he mourns?  Who, when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved, when he feels his heart, as it were, crushed, in the closing of its portal, would accept of consolation that must be bought by forgetfulness?  No; the love that survives the tomb is one of the noblest attributes of the soul.  If it has its woes, it has likewise its delights; and when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection; when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved is softened away into pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness, who would root out such a sorrow from the heart?  Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud over the bright hour of gayety, or spread a deeper sadness over the hour of gloom, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure or the burst of revelry?  No; there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song; there is a remembrance of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living....  But the grave of those we love, what a place for meditation!  There it is that we call up in long review the whole history of virtue and goodness, and the thousand endearments lavished upon us almost unheeded in the daily intercourse of intimacy; there it is that we dwell upon the tenderness, the solemn, awful tenderness of the dying scene.  The bed of death, with all its stifled griefs, its noiseless attendance, its mute, watchful assiduities.  The last testimonies of expiring love!  The feeble, fluttering, thrilling—­oh! how thrilling—­pressure of the hand!  The last fond look of the glazing eye turned upon us even from the threshold of existence!  The faint, faltering accents struggling in death to give one more assurance of affection!’

How truly is this passage ’to be interpreted in the light of the event in Irving’s history’, when it is evident from a comparison of it with the memoranda, that it is a sketch of that scene which wrecked his brightest hopes, and that here he is renewing in this unequaled description of a dying-bed, the last hours of Matilda Hoffman.  The highly-wrought picture presents a complete detail to the eye, and yet still more powerful is that simple utterance in the memoranda:  ’I was the last one she looked upon.’