It is understood that Mr. Irving is now engaged in completing the Life of Washington, a work of which he commenced the preparation before his residence in Europe as Minister to the Spanish Court. We are informed that it will probably be given to the public in the course of another season. It can not fail to prove a volume of national and household interest. The revered features of the Immortal Patriot will assume a still more benignant aspect, under the affectionate and skillful touches of the congenial Artist. With his unrivaled power of individualization, his practiced ability in historical composition, and his acute sense of the moral perspective in character, he will present the illustrious subject of his biography in a manner to increase our admiration of his virtues, and to inspire a fresh enthusiasm for the wise and beneficent principles of which his life was the sublime embodiment. There is a beautiful propriety in the still more intimate connection of the name of WASHINGTON IRVING with that of the FATHER OF HIS COUNTRY. It is meet that the most permanent and precious memorial of the First Chief of the American Republic should be presented by the Patriarch of American Letters. It would be a fitting close of his bright career before the public--the melodious swan-song of his historic Muse. [Illustration: SUNNYSIDE, THE RESIDENCE OF WASHINGTON IRVING.] [Illustration: William Cullen Bryant.] The birthplace of Mr. BRYANT, in a secluded and romantic spot among the mountains of western Massachusetts, seems to have been selected by Nature as a fit residence for the early unfolding of high poetic genius. Situated on the forest elevations above the beautiful valley of the Connecticut in the old county of Hampshire, surrounded by a rare combination of scenery, in which are impressively blended the wild and rugged with the soft and graceful, adorned in summer with the splendors of a rapid and luxuriant vegetation, in winter exposed to the fiercest storms from the northwest which bury the roads and almost the houses in gigantic snow-drifts, inhabited by a hardy and primitive population which exhibit the peculiar traits of New England character in their most salient form, the little town of Cummington has the distinction of giving birth to the greatest American poet. It was here that he was first inspired with a sense of the glory and mystery of Nature--first learned to "hold communion with her visible forms," and to lend his ear to her "various language"--first awoke to the consciousness of the "vision and the faculty divine," which he has since displayed in such manifold forms of poetic creation. It was under the shadow of his "native hills"-- "Broad, round, and green, that in the summer sky With garniture of waving grass and grain, Orchards, and beechen forests basking lie, While deep the sunless glens are scooped between Where brawl o'er shallow beds the streams unseen"--