"Other hands will yet give the world a bolder, more vivid, and more
exact portraiture. In the mean time, when I consider for how many
years he stood before the world as an author, with still increasing
fame,--half a century in this most changeful of centuries,--I cannot
hesitate to predict for him a deathless renown. Since he began to write,
empires have arisen and passed away; mighty captains have appeared on
the stage of the world, performed their part, and been called to
their account; wars have been fought and ended which have changed the
destinies of the human race. New arts have been invented and adopted,
and have pushed the old out of use; the household economy of half
mankind has undergone a revolution. Science has learned a new dialect
and forgotten the old; the chemist of 1807 would be a vain babbler among
his brethren of the present day, and would in turn become bewildered in
the attempt to understand them. Nation utters speech to nation in words
that pass from realm to realm with the speed of light. Distant countries
have been made neighbors; the Atlantic Ocean has become a narrow frith,
and the Old World and the New shake hands across it; the East and the
West look in at each other's windows. The new inventions bring new
calamities, and men perish in crowds by the recoil of their own devices.
War has learned more frightful modes of havoc, and armed himself with
deadlier weapons; armies are borne to the battle-field on the wings of
the wind, and dashed against each other and destroyed with infinite
bloodshed. We grow giddy with this perpetual whirl of strange events,
these rapid and ceaseless mutations; the earth seems to be reeling under
our feet, and we turn to those who write like Irving for some assurance
that we are still in the same world into which we were born; we read,
and are quieted and consoled. In his pages we see that the language of
the heart never becomes obsolete; that Truth and Good and Beauty,
the offspring of God, are not subject to the changes which beset the
inventions of men. We become satisfied that he whose works were the
delight of our fathers, and are still ours, will be read with the same
pleasure by those who come after us."