“While the editor does not question Mr. Irving’s great enjoyment of his intercourse with the Fosters, or his deep regret at parting from them, he is too familiar with his occasional fits of depression to have drawn from their recurrence on his return to Paris any such inference as that to which the lady alludes.  Indeed, his memorandum book and letters show him to have had, at this time, sources of anxiety of quite a different nature.  The allusion to his having to put once more to sea evidently refers to his anxiety on returning to his literary pursuits, after a season of entire idleness.”

It is not for us to question the judgment of the biographer, with his full knowledge of the circumstances and his long intimacy with his uncle; yet it is evident that Irving was seriously impressed at Dresden, and that he was very much unsettled until he drove away the impression by hard work with his pen; and it would be nothing new in human nature and experience if he had for a time yielded to the attractions of loveliness and a most congenial companionship, and had returned again to an exclusive devotion to the image of the early loved and lost.

That Irving intended never to marry is an inference I cannot draw either from his fondness for the society of women, from his interest in the matrimonial projects of his friends and the gossip which has feminine attractions for its food, or from his letters to those who had his confidence.  In a letter written from Birmingham, England, March 15, 1816, to his dear friend Henry Brevoort, who was permitted more than perhaps any other person to see his secret heart, he alludes, with gratification, to the report of the engagement of James Paulding, and then says: 

“It is what we must all come to at last.  I see you are hankering after it, and I confess I have done so for a long time past.  We are, however, past that period [Irving was thirty-two] when a man marries suddenly and inconsiderately.  We may be longer making a choice, and consulting the convenience and concurrence of easy circumstances, but we shall both come to it sooner or later.  I therefore recommend you to marry without delay.  You have sufficient means, connected with your knowledge and habits of business, to support a genteel establishment, and I am certain that as soon as you are married you will experience a change in your ideas.  All those vagabond, roving propensities will cease.  They are the offspring of idleness of mind and a want of something to fix the feelings.  You are like a bark without an anchor, that drifts about at the mercy of every vagrant breeze or trifling eddy.  Get a wife, and she’ll anchor you.  But don’t marry a fool because she his a pretty face, and don’t seek after a great belle.  Get such a girl as Mary——­, or get her if you can; though I am afraid she has still an unlucky kindness for poor-----, which will stand in the way of her fortunes.  I wish to God they were rich, and married, and happy!”