The scene at the house of Mr. Hoffman, to which the biographer alludes, took place after Irving's second return from Europe, and after an absence of nearly twenty years from his native land. During this time he had become famous as an author, and had been conceded the position of the first American gentleman in Europe. He had been received at Courts as in his official position (Secretary of Legation) and had received the admiration of the social and intellectual aristocracy of England. Returning full of honors, he became at once the lion of New-York, and was greeted by a public dinner at the City Hotel. How little could it have been imagined, that amid all this harvest of honors, while he stood the cynosure of a general admiration, he should still be under the power of a youthful attachment, and that outliving all the glories of his splendid success, a maiden, dead thirty years, held him with undying power. While others thought him the happy object of a nation's popularity, his heart was stealing away from noise and notice to the hallowed ground where Matilda lay. '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