Washington Irving completed that most extravagantly humorous of all his works--the History of New York--while he was suffering from the death of his sweetheart, Matilda Hoffman, which nearly broke his heart. He says, in a memorandum found amongst his private papers after his death, "She was but about seventeen years old when she died. I cannot tell what a horrid state of mind I was in for a long time. I seemed to care for nothing; the world was a blank to me. I went into the country, but could not bear solitude, yet could not enjoy society. There was a dismal horror continually in my mind, that made me fear to be alone. I had often to get up in the night, and seek the bedroom of my brother, as if the having a human being by me would relieve me from the frightful gloom of my own thoughts.... When I became more calm and collected, I applied myself, by way of occupation, to the finishing of my work. I brought it to a close, as well as I could, and published it; but the time and circumstances in which it was produced rendered me almost unable to look upon it with satisfaction. Still it took with the public, and gave me celebrity, as an original work was something remarkable and uncommon in America.... 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 roam 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."
Heine, for several years preceding his death, was a miserable paralytic. All that time, it is stated, he lay upon a pile of mattresses, racked by pain and exhausted by sleeplessness, till his body was reduced below all natural dimensions, and his long beard fell over the coverlet like swan's down or a baby's hair. The muscular debility was such that he had to raise the eyelid with his hand when he wished to see the face of any one about him; and thus in darkness, he thought, and listened, and dictated, preserving to the very last his clearness of intellect, his precision of diction, and his invincible humor.