Mr. Mitchell has been several times abroad, always returning with something refreshing for his American readers. He has also lectured on literature at Yale College. In 1853, he was appointed United States Consul to Venice by President Pierce, but resigned after a few months. His home has been, since 1855, on his charming country place, “Edgewood,” near New Haven, Connecticut, and nearly all his books—except “English Lands and Letters” (1890), and “American Lands and Letters” (1897)—are fragrant with the breath of the farm and rural scenery.
Mr. Mitchell was married in 1853 to Miss Mary F. Pringle, of Charleston, South Carolina, who accompanied him when he went as Consul to Venice.
Mr. Mitchell filled a number of semi-public positions, and was one of the first members of the council of the Yale Art School at its establishment in 1865. He was also one of the judges of Industrial Art at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and was United States Commissioner at the Paris Exposition in 1878. His contributions to “The Atlantic Monthly,” to “Harper’s Magazine,” and other periodicals, his lectures and addresses on Literature and Agriculture have always been well received.
Among his books not already mentioned are “The Seven Stories with Basement and Attic,” a series of tales of travel; “A Single Novel;” “Doctor Johns;” one juvenile story “About Old Story-Tellers,” and an elaborate genealogy of his mother’s family entitled “The Woodbridge Record.”
WASHINGTON IRVING.
(FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO “DREAM LIFE.”)
N the summer of 1852 Mr. Irving made a stay of a few weeks at Saratoga; and, by good fortune, I chanced to occupy a room upon the same corridor of the hotel, within a few doors of his, and shared many of his early morning walks to the “Spring.” What at once struck me very forcibly in the course of these walks was the rare alertness and minuteness of his observation. Not a fair young face could dash past us in its drapery of muslin, but the eye of the old gentleman—he was then almost seventy—drank in all its freshness and beauty, with the keen appetite and the graceful admiration of a boy; not a dowager brushed past us, bedizened with finery, but he fastened the apparition in his memory with some piquant remark, as the pin of an entomologist fastens a gaudy fly. No rheumatic old hero-invalid, battered in long wars with the doctors, no droll marplot of a boy, could appear within range, but I could see in the changeful expression of my companion the admeasurements and quiet adjustment of the appeal which either made upon his sympathy or his humor. A flower, a tree, a burst of music, a country market man hoist upon his wagon of cabbage—all these by turns caught and engaged his attention, however little they might interrupt the flow of his talk.
He was utterly incapable of being “lionized.” Time and again, under the trees in the court of the hotel, did I hear him enter upon some pleasant story, lighted up with that rare turn of his eye and by his deft expressions; when, as chance acquaintances grouped around him, as is the way of watering-places, and eager listeners multiplied, his hilarity and spirit took a chill from the increasing auditory, and drawing abruptly to a close, he would sidle away with a friend, and be gone....