Poems by Washington Irving

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker Magazine.

Though your body be confined

In a preceding paper I have spoken of an English Sunday in the country and its tranquillizing effect upon the landscape; but where is its sacred influence more strikingly apparent than in the very heart of that great Babel, London? On this sacred day

But is old, old, good old Christmas gone? Nothing but the hair of his good, gray old head and beard left? Well, I will have that, seeing I cannot have more of him.

Dark and dull night, flie hence away,

Saint Francis and Saint Benedight

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

“Let a man write never so well, there are now-a-days a sort of persons they call critics, that, egad, have no more wit in them than so many hobby-horses: but they’ll laugh at you, Sir, and find fault, and censure things, that, egad, I’m sure they are

Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation, rousting herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle, mewing her mighty youth, and kindling her endazzled eyes at the full mid-day beam

An old song, made by an aged old pate,

In the cloisters of the ancient Benedictine convent of San Domingo, at Silos, in Castile, are the mouldering yet magnificent monuments of the once powerful and chivalrous family of Hinojosa. Among these, reclines the marble figure of a knight, in com

At the dark and melancholy period when Don Roderick the Goth and his chivalry were overthrown on the banks of the Guadalete, and all Spain was overrun by the Moors, great was the devastation of churches and convents throughout that pious kingdom. The

What I write is most true . . . . . I have a whole booke of cases lying by me, which if I should sette foorth, some grave auntients (within the hearing of Bow Bell) would be out of charity with me.

I do walk

Go, little booke, God send thee good passage,

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

It is the common lamentation of Spanish historiographers, that, for an obscure and melancholy space of time immediately succeeding the conquest of their country by the Moslems, its history is a mere wilderness of dubious facts, groundless fables, and

As monumental bronze unchanged his look:

Recollections of the Alhambra

A Posthumous Writing of Diedrich Knickerbocker

In the service of mankind to be

Here’s a few flowers! but about midnight more:

Oh! friendly to the best pursuits of man,

By Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker.

Thou soft-flowing Avon, by thy silver stream

On the summit of a craggy hill, a spur of the mountains of Ronda, stands the castle of Allora, now a mere ruin, infested by bats and owlets, but in old times one of the strong border holds of the Christians, to keep watch upon the frontiers of the wa

In the early part of the fifteenth century, when Prince Henry of Portugal, of worthy memory, was pushing the career of discovery along the western coast of Africa, and the world was resounding with reports of golden regions on the main land, and new-

This day Dame Nature seem’d in love,

If that severe doom of Synesius be true, “It is a greater offence to steal dead men’s labor, than their clothes,” what shall become of most writers?

“Who did not think, till within these foure yeares, but that these islands had been rather a habitation for Divells, than fit for men to dwell in? Who did not hate the name, when hee was on land, and shun the place when he was on the seas? But behold

by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

“A tavern is the rendezvous, the exchange, the staple of good fellows. I have heard my great-grandfather tell, how his great-great-grandfather should say, that it was an old proverb when his great-grandfather was a child, that ‘it was a good wind tha

I never heard

Lo, now is come our joyful’st feast!

During the minority of Louis XV., while the Duke of Orleans was Regent of France, a young Flemish nobleman, the Count Antoine Joseph Van Horn, made his sudden appearance in Paris, and by his character, conduct, and the subsequent disasters in which h

A gentleman!

Break, Phantsie, from thy cave of cloud,

Shall I not take mine ease in mine inn?

To the Editor of the Knickerbocker

Found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker

I know that all beneath the moon decays,

May no wolfe howle; no screech owle stir,

A Traveller’s Tale.1

Omne bene

Ships, ships, I will descrie you

Pittie olde age, within whose silver haires

The treasures of the deep are not so precious

“I appeal to any white man if ever he entered Logan’s cabin hungry, and he gave him not to eat; if ever he came cold and naked, and he clothed him not.”

When I behold, with deep astonishment,