That Crayon should turn to stories that he or someone with whom he is in touch has “found among the papers of the late Diedrich Knickerbocker” suggests that there is a counterforce working in him, balancing the attractions of England. The Knickerbocker stories give us specifically realized landscapes with figures in them to whom we are brought much closer than we are in the English sketches. Human beings, relate to one another and to the physical environment more informally. The narrator is at home in the land.

The disturbances that mar the idyllic composure of these localities ring familiarly in the context of The Sketch Book. Either Rip Van Winkle or Ichabod Crane might be a figure in Crayon’s dreams. Both are collectors and tellers of stories. Rip, in conflict with the nose-to-the-grindstone mentality of his wife, has “an insuperable aversion to all kinds of profitable labour.” Ichabod will work as a schoolmaster if he has to, but he would rather sing, dance, or tell stories for his supper—and his appetite is voracious. Although the aura of mystery and the supernatural in these two texts derives largely from Irving’s reading in German folklore and romantic fiction, they seem nonetheless remarkably American, not only in setting and character but in their social or cultural implications as well.

Though sometimes hinting that Dame Van Winkle’s shrewishness may be a function of her husband’s reluctance to work his land, Rip’s story is largely sympathetic to his “idle humour” and “vagrant imagination.” Following them away from his marriage and into the mountains, he loses the prime of his life in a dreamless sleep. But when he gets over the shock of waking up, he finds himself, at an age when no one can expect him to work, comfortably provided for. And he has a fantastic story to tell.

If the issue in that story is a tension between imagination or artistic inclination and industry or industriousness, in “Sleepy Hollow” it seems to be between imagination and money. We find Ichabod Crane referred to curiously as a “man of letters.” The remark is of course ironic. His one-room schoolhouse is called “his literary realm.” In the village he passes for a man of “superior taste,” a “kind of idle gentleman like personage.” These phrases resonate ludicrously in the context of The Sketch Book. For Ichabod is “in fact, an odd mixture of small shrewdness and simple credulity,” a superstitious, psalm singing Connecticut Yankee with an eye to the main chance. He uses his music and storytelling as a false front masking his more serious intentions. What his “imagination” truly “expanded with,” we are told, was the prospect of winning Katrina Van Tassel’s hand and thereby gaining possession of her father’s ample acres. These he would convert into “cash,” to be used in turn for speculating in western real estate.

In the face of this threat the community imagination seems to materialize and frighten the imposter out of the region. Later, it is rumored, he migrates to a “distant part of the country,” probably to the west and closer to the frontier, where, by Yankee ingenuity and calculation apparently, instead of an advantageous marriage, he rises from schoolmaster and law student to lawyer, politician, and finally small-time judge. Oh yes, along the way he also writes, for the newspapers. Back in Sleepy Hollow there are no writers, but the people thrive on storytelling. A flourishing oral literature gives the locality a sense of itself and its past. It turns out that Knickerbocker is only the conveyor of the story we have read. He heard it in the city and wrote it down; Crayon apparently gets it into print. The man who told it at the “corporation meeting” in New York, which Knickerbocker attended, seems to have heard it from an “old farmer,” who thus turns out to be the creator of the second “legend of Sleepy Hollow,” that is, the legend of Ichabod Crane—unless, of course, Brom Bones had a hand in it.

Crayon’s compendium finally becomes an artful comment on authorship or storytelling in a rapidly expanding democratic and commercial society, a comment, in effect, on itself, on the writer’s effort to satisfy both a popular audience and himself. But Crayon the writer and Crayon the traveler are not easily separated. His literary longings and anxieties closely relate to what general readers of The Sketch Book are apt to be more aware of—the traveler’s yearning for a home. Metaphorically integral to the work as a whole, the re-creation of old English Christmas at Bracebridge Hall is crucial in Irving’s promotion of Anglo-American amicability. He is helping his compatriots discover what Hawthorne was to call in the title of his own book on England (1863) Our Old Home.

The Christmas sequence, a major event in early American popular culture, needs to be seen against the background of Puritanism’s long-established hostility, especially in New England, to Christmas as a pagan and popish holiday. Here Crayon’s felicitous style wraps the major themes and images of the book together in an attractive package, a special gift for the reader. The landscape, the manor house, the family, the servants, and the villagers unite, with Crayon, a welcome guest now in “the land of my forefathers,” to form a glowing image of peace and good will. But what gives this Christmas its full meaning is the sense of tradition behind it, a tradition in which Christianity blends with vestiges of pagan rites and customs derived from the Druids, Romans, Saxons, and Scandinavians. Holly, ivy, mistletoe, the “yule clog,” the lord of misrule, “an enormous pig’s head, decorated with rosemary, with a lemon in its mouth”—such bows to the past adorn the occasion. Simultaneously Crayon draws copiously on English Christmas poetry that he has resurrected from his libraries.

In the juxtaposition of his writing to the earlier texts, readers may begin to sense the meaningful continuity between present and past that Crayon in his more joyful moods can count on as at least a temporary stay against the all-encompassing mutability.