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The delightful genius which his country had recognized with joy it never ceased proudly and tenderly to honor. When, in 1832, he returned to his native land, as his latest biographer, Mr. Warner, records, “America greeted her most famous literary man with a spontaneous outburst of love and admiration.” It was in his own country that he had published his works. It was his own countrymen whose applause apprised England of the charm of the new author; and it is a humorous mentor who now teaches us that it was our happy docility to English guidance which enabled us to recognize and honor him.

Was it docility to the same beneficent guidance which enabled us to perceive the genius of Carlyle, whose works we first collected, and taught England to read and admire? Did it enable us, also, to inform England that in Robert Browning she had another poet? Was it the same docility which enabled us to reveal to England one of her most philosophic observers in Herbert Spencer, and to offer to Darwin his most appreciative correspondents and interpreters in Chauncey Wright, John Fiske, and Professors Gray and Wyman? There are many offences to be scored against us, but failure to know our own literary genius is not one of them.

Indeed, there is not one great literary fame in America that was not first recognized here. Not to one of them has docility to English literary opinion conducted us, as is often believed. Bryant and Cooper and Irving, Bancroft and Prescott and Motley, Emerson and Channing, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Lowell, Whittier, and Holmes were authors whom we were content to admire and love without knowing or asking whether England had heard of them, or what she thought of them. The “greatness” of Poe England may have preceded us in recognizing. That is an assertion which we are not disposed to dispute. But Walter Scott was not more immediately popular and beloved in England than was Washington Irving in America; and American guidance led England to Scott quite as much as English guidance drew America to Irving.

The first number of the Sketch Book contained the tale of Rip Van Winkle, one of the most charming and suggestive of legends, whose hero is an exceedingly pathetic creation. It is, indeed, a mere sketch, a hint, a suggestion; but the imagination readily completes it. It is the more remarkable and interesting because, although the first American literary creation, it is not in the least characteristic of American life, but, on the contrary, is a quiet and delicate satire upon it. The kindly vagabond asserts the charm of loitering idleness in the sweet leisure of woods and fields against the characteristic American excitement of the overflowing crowd and crushing competition of the city, its tremendous energy and incessant devotion to money-getting.

It is not necessary to defend poor Rip, or to justify the morality of his example. It is the imagination that interprets him; and how soothing to those who give their lives to the furious accumulation of the means of living to behold that figure stretched by the brook, or finding nuts with the children, or sauntering homeward at sunset! Later figures of our literature allure us–Hester Prynne, wrapped in her cloak of Nersus, the Scarlet Letter, Hosea Biglow, Evangeline, Uncle Tom, and Topsy–but the charm of this figure is unfading. The new writers introduce us to their worlds, and with pleasure we make the acquaintance of new friends. The new standards of another literary spirit are raised, a fresh literary impulse surrounds us; but it is not thunder that we hear in the Kaatskills on a still summer afternoon it is the distant game of Hendrick Hudson and his men; and on the shore of our river, rattling and roaring with the frenzied haste and endless activity of prosperous industry, still Rip Van Winkle lounges idly by, an unwasted figure of the imagination, the constant and unconscious satirist of American life.