After staying a week with his brother Peter, who was recovering from an indisposition, Irving went to Birmingham, the residence of his brother-in-law, Henry Van Wart, who had married his youngest sister, Sarah; and from thence to Sydenham, to visit Campbell.  The poet was not at home.  To Mrs. Campbell Irving expressed his regret that her husband did not attempt something on a grand scale.

“‘It is unfortunate for Campbell,’ said she, ’that he lives in the same age with Scott and Byron.’  I asked why.  ‘Oh,’ said she, ’they write so much and so rapidly.  Mr. Campbell writes slowly, and it takes him some time to get under way; and just as he has fairly begun out comes one of their poems, that sets the world agog, and quite daunts him, so that he throws by his pen in despair.’  I pointed out the essential difference in their kinds of poetry, and the qualities which insured perpetuity to that of her husband.  ’You can’t persuade Campbell of that,’ said she.  ’He is apt to undervalue his own works, and to consider his own little lights put out, whenever they come blazing out with their great torches.’

“I repeated the conversation to Scott some time afterward, and it drew forth a characteristic comment.  ‘Pooh!’ said he, good humoredly; ’how can Campbell mistake the matter so much?  Poetry goes by quality, not by bulk.  My poems are mere Cairngorms, wrought up, perhaps, with a cunning hand, and may pass well in the market as long as Cairngorms are the fashion; but they are mere Scotch pebbles, after all.  Now, Tom Campbell’s are real diamonds, and diamonds of the first water.’”

Returning to Birmingham, Irving made excursions to Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon, and a tour through Wales with James Renwick, a young American of great promise, who at the age of nineteen had for a time filled the chair of natural philosophy in Columbia College.  He was a son of Mrs. Jane Renwick, a charming woman and a lifelong friend of Irving, the daughter of the Rev. Andrew Jeffrey, of Lochmaben, Scotland, and famous in literature as “The Blue-Eyed Lassie” of Burns.  From another song, “When first I saw my Face,” which does not appear in the poet’s collected works, the biographer quotes: 

       “But, sair, I doubt some happier swain
       Has gained my Jeanie’s favor;
       If sae, may every bliss be hers,
       Tho’ I can never have her.

       “But gang she east, or gang she west,
       ’Twixt Nith and Tweed all over,
       While men have eyes, or ears, or taste,
       She’ll always find a lover.”

During Irving’s protracted stay in England he did not by any means lose his interest in his beloved New York and the little society that was always dear to him.  He relied upon his friend Brevoort to give him the news of the town, and in return he wrote long letters,—­longer and more elaborate and formal than this generation has leisure to write or to read; letters in which the writer laid himself out to be entertaining, and detailed his emotions and state of mind as faithfully as his travels and outward experiences.