many more calculated to lay bare his true feelings), even
fragmentary as they are, point out the truth.

"Here is the key to the journey to Silesia, the return to Dresden,
and, finally, to the journey from Dresden to Rotterdam in our
company, first planned so as to part at Cassel, where Mr. Irving
had intended to leave us and go down the Rhine, but subsequently
could not find in his heart to part. Hence, after a night of pale
and speechless melancholy, the gay, animated, happy countenance
with which he sprang to our coachbox to take his old seat on it,
and accompany us to Rotterdam. There even could he not part, but
joined us in the steamboat; and, after bearing us company as far as
a boat could follow us, at last tore himself away, to bury himself
in Paris, and try to work....

"It was fortunate, perhaps, that this affection was returned by the
_warmest friendship_ only, since it was destined that the
accomplishment of his wishes was impossible, for many obstacles
which lay in his way; and it is with pleasure I can truly say that
in time he schooled himself to view, also with friendship only, one
who for some time past has been the wife of another."

Upon the delicacy of this revelation the biographer does not comment,
but he says that the idea that Irving thought of marriage at that time
is utterly disproved by the following passage from the very manuscript
which he submitted to Mrs. Foster:--

"You wonder why I am not married. I have shown you why I was not
long since. When I had sufficiently recovered from that loss, I
became involved in ruin. It was not for a man broken down in the