Volume 17 , Issue 39

Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

In Reading Times, Reading Pennsylvania, dated 25 October 1877, Thursday, page 1, we find this mention of Washington Irving's short story, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow:"

Found on Newspapers.com

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is fitted to that quiet melancholy country near Tarrytown. There was something inexpressible in theater of Sleepy Hollow. "The Sketch Book" makes the Hudson as celebrated as the Rhine. The Tales of a Traveller lacks local association.

Irving's Education and Early Trials

Washington Irving was a classically educated man, a man of great knowledge of the human heart. His first volume was printed at his own expense, as no London publisher wanted to take the risk of publication. He worked from ten to fourteen hours per day when he wrote his "Life of Columbus." The University of London crowned him with LL.D.

Irving's return to America - After seventeen years' absence Irving returned to American and received with great honors; a grand banquet was given him at New York, Kent, President of Columbia College, presiding. Soon after he bought eight acres of land near Tarrytown, goes as Minister to Spain, then to London to settle the Oregon troubles.

On one of his last visits to London he was domiciled with a friend in the Cloisters of Westminster Abbey, and from there he wrote to his sister: "How strange it seems to me, that I should thus be nestled quietly in the very heart of the old pile that used to be the scene of my half romantic, half meditative haunts. It is like my sojourn in the halls of Alhambra. Am I always to have my dreams turned into reality?"

Singularly enough even Sunnyside itself was foreshadowed in his legend of Sleepy Hollow written in his thirty-sixth year, and the reader of the Sketch Book would remember his reference near the beginning of the essay to a little alley near Tarrytown, one of the quietest places in the whole world. He said, "If ever I should wish for a retreat whither I might steal from the world and its distractions and dream quietly away the remnant of a troubled life, I know of none more promising than this little valley.?

Twenty-three years after Irving writes to his brother in Spain, "I hope some day or other to sleep my last sleep in this favorite report of my boyhood." And when the long procession wound its way from Sunnyside through quiet Irvington and Tarrytown, among scenes which had found new Charm in Irving's life across the old bridge draped with mourning, passed the Dutch Church with its hallowed memories of two hundred years to the peaceful valley of Sleepy Hollow, it seemed not so much a mourning processions a poetic pilgrimage, as if his dreams were realized in his last sleep, as if there were a kindred sympathy in the words "dust to dust," and that the land he had filled with his legends was only receiving him to his own. It was one of those warm November days, which seemed to belong to our Hudson Valley, as mild and gentle as the spring time, and the broad river, every point of which was punctuated with exclamations of beauty, lay tranquil, as the heart of the gentle writer, as if it too missed a friend and companion, for -

"They do not err
Who say that when a poet dies,
Mute nature morns her worshipper
And celebrates his obsequies."
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