in America.  I was noticed, caressed, and, for a time, elevated by the popularity I had gained.  I found myself uncomfortable in my feelings in New York, and traveled about a little.  Wherever I went I was overwhelmed with attentions; I was full of youth and animation, far different from the being I now am, and I was quite flushed with this early taste of public favor.  Still, however, the career of gayety and notoriety soon palled on me.  I seemed to drift about without aim or object, at the mercy of every breeze; my heart wanted anchorage.  I was naturally susceptible, and tried to form other attachments, but my heart would not hold on; it would continually recur to what it had lost; and whenever there was a pause in the hurry of novelty and excitement, I would sink into dismal dejection.  For years I could not talk on the subject of this hopeless regret; I could not even mention her name; but her image was continually before me, and I dreamt of her incessantly.”

This memorandum, it subsequently appeared, was a letter, or a transcript of it, addressed to a married lady, Mrs. Foster, in which the story of his early love was related, in reply to her question why he had never married.  It was in the year 1823, the year after the publication of “Bracebridge Hall,” while he sojourned in Dresden, that he became intimate with an English family residing there, named Foster, and conceived for the daughter, Miss Emily Foster, a warm friendship and perhaps a deep attachment.  The letter itself, which for the first time broke the guarded seclusion of Irving’s heart, is evidence of the tender confidence that existed between him and this family.  That this intimacy would have resulted in marriage, or an offer of marriage, if the lady’s affections had not been preoccupied, the Fosters seem to have believed.  In an unauthorized addition to the “Life and Letters,” inserted in the English edition without the knowledge of the American editor, with some such headings as, “History of his First Love brought to us, and returned,” and “Irving’s Second Attachment,” the Fosters tell the interesting story of Irving’s life in Dresden, and give many of his letters, and an account of his intimacy with the family.  From this account I quote:—­

“Soon after this, Mr. Irving, who had again for long felt ’the tenderest interest warm his bosom, and finally enthrall his whole soul,’ made one vigorous and valiant effort to free himself from a hopeless and consuming attachment.  My mother counseled him, I believe, for the best, and he left Dresden on an expedition of several weeks into a country he had long wished to see, though, in the main, it disappointed him; and he started with young Colbourne (son of General Colbourne) as his companion.  Some of his letters on this journey are before the public; and in the agitation and eagerness he there described, on receiving and opening letters from us, and the tenderness in his replies,—­the longing to be once more in the little Pavilion, to which