twenty years, with his crew of the "Half-Moon,"1 being permitted in this way to revisit the scenes of his enterprise, and keep a guardian eye upon the great river called by his name; that his father had once seen them in their old Dutch dresses, playing at ninepins in a hollow of the mountain; and that he himself had heard, one summer afternoon, the sound of their balls, like distant2 peals of thunder. To make a long story short, the company broke up, and returned to the more important concerns of the election. Rip's daughter took him home to live with her: she had a snug, well-furnished house, and a stout cheery farmer for her husband, whom Rip recollected for one of the urchins that used to climb upon his back. As to Rip's son and heir, who was the ditto3 of himself, seen leaning against the tree, he was employed to work on the farm, but evinced an hereditary disposition to attend to any thing else but his business. Rip now resumed his old walks and habits: he soon found many of his former cronies, though all rather the worse for the wear and tear of time; and preferred making friends among the rising generation, with whom he soon grew into great favor. Having nothing to do at home, and being arrived at that happy age when a man can be idle with impunity, he took his place once more on the bench at the inn 1 "Half-Moon:" the name of 3 the ditto. See Webster for the the vessel in which Hudson first derivation. The use of the expressailed up the river that bears his sion here is scarcely in accord with Irving's almost invariably pure phraseology. name. 2 distant. See Glossary. door, and was reverenced as one of the patriarchs of the village, and a chronicle of the old times "before the war." It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor,-how that there had been a Revolutionary war, that the country had thrown off the yoke of Old England, and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that waspetticoat government. Happily that was at an end: he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony, and could go in and out whenever he pleased, without dreading the tyranny of Dame Van Winkle. Whenever her name was mentioned, however, he shook his head, shrugged his shoulders, and cast up his eyes; which might pass either for an expression of resignation to his fate, or joy at his deliverance. He used to tell his story to every stranger that arrived at Mr. Doolittle's hotel. He was observed, at first, to vary on some points every time he told it, which was doubtless owing to his having so recently awakened. It at last settled down precisely to the tale I have related; and not a man, woman, or child in the neighborhood but knew it by heart. Some always pretended to doubt the reality of it, and insisted that Rip had been out of his head, and that this was one point on which he always remained flighty. The old Dutch inhabitants, however, almost universally gave it full credit. Even to this day they never hear a thunder-storm of a summer afternoon about the Kaatskill, but they say Hendrick Hudson and his crew are at their game of ninepins; and it is a common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draught out of Rip Van Winkle's flagon. X-GEORGE GORDON BYRON. LIFE AND WORKS. WHEN We think of Byron, there arises in our mind the image of a violent, madly sensitive soul, defying Heaven, defying society, eating his own heart. This wild, passionate nature was a fatal inheritance from a long line of lawless ancestors. On his father's side he was a descendant of the vikings, those famous wasters of the sea. His father himself, "mad Jack," was a profligate captain in the Guards; and his granduncle bore the title of "the wicked lord," from having killed his neighbor, Mr. Chaworth, in a murderous duel. His mother, "bonny Catharine Gordon o' Gight," had an uncontrolled temper that bordered on insanity. She used, when her little son ran round the room, laughing at her attempts to catch him, to say he was as bad as his father, and to call him "a lame brat." This son, the only child of this ill-assorted pair, was born Jan. 22, 1788, in Hollis Street, London, and was named George Gordon Byron. He had a club-foot, a deformity he never forgot. He was soon left a halforphan; and passed his early youth with his mother at Aberdeen, Scotland. He inherited the family title and estate, Newstead Abbey, in his eleventh year (1798), and two years later was sent to Harrow, an English public school, for five years (1800 to 1805). Here, on one occasion, when Sir Robert Peel was being officially flogged by his "fag master" (an older boy), Byron rushed up and offered to take half the blows. When fifteen (1803) he met, near Newstead Abbey, Mary Chaworth, a girl two years older than himself, with whom he fell in love. She received his attentions, but one day said to her maid, within his hearing, "Do you think I could care for that lame boy?" Byron afterwards embodied this, his first love, in a poem called The Dream. Two years later (1805) he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Once, while at home on a vacation, his mother and he had a quarrel, and both ran to the neighboring apothecary, each to beg him not to sell the other poison. At another time she replied to one of his sarcasms by flinging a poker at his head. Byron's first humble volume of poems, Hours of Idleness (1807), was attacked by Lord Brougham with knife and tomahawk in the Edinburgh Review; but soon afterwards (1809) the reviewer was himself flayed by Byron in a satire called English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Byron then left England, and on his return the first half of Childe Harold was published (1812). The effect was electrical. "I woke up," he says, "and found myself famous." For three years afterwards he poured on the public a flood of Eastern rhymed romances, The Giaour, Corsair, and others, in all of which are found passages of marvelous beauty. In the zenith of his early fame he married Miss Milbanke (1815); but she soon separated from him, and, amid a torrent of abuse, he himself left England never to return. They had one child, a daughter, Ada. |