[Illustration: IRVING'S GRAVE IN THE SLEEPY HOLLOW CEMETERY]
His best work is a product of the romantic imagination, but his romanticism
is of a finer type than that of Charles Brockden Brown and the English
Gothic school (p. 88), for Irving's fondness for Addison and Goldsmith, in
conjunction with his own keen sense of humor, taught him restraint,
balance, and the adaptation of means to ends.
Irving has an unusual power of investing his subjects with the proper
atmosphere. In this he resembles the greatest landscape painters. If he
writes of early settlers of New York, we are in a Dutch atmosphere. If he
tells the legends of the Alhambra, the atmosphere is Moorish. If he takes
us to the Hudson or the Catskills or Sleepy Hollow or Granada, he adds to
our artistic enjoyment by enveloping everything in its own peculiar
atmosphere.
His clear, simple, smooth prose conceals its artistic finish so well and
serves as the vehicle for so much humor, that readers often pass a long
time in his company without experiencing fatigue. His style has been
criticized for lack of vigor and for resemblance to Goldsmith's. Irving's
style, however, is his own, and it is the style natural to a man of his
placid, artistic temperament.
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