deserts; lakes like the oceans-the shadows of those forests whose shadows are eternal.

Let him go upon the sea, and his enthusiasm becomes a religious passion. You would say that the waves were his, so beautiful in their terror, so sublime in their truth are his maritime pictures. He does not show you the phantom of a vessel or the phantom of an ocean; a painted ship upon a painted sea; but all, on his barks or around them, is action and life, character and poetry.

Enemy of the vague, never pleased with it, nor admitting it into his pictures, he surrounds you with accessories so numerous, so true, so detailed that even their insignificance adds to the truth of the whole. The sails swell, the cables rattle, the yards creak, the tar smokes, the sailors sing, the captain whistles, the billow foams, the wave strikes noisily the side of the ship. There is no more land, nor anything that recalls it. But when the land reappears, you find yourself cast upon a new shore, deserted, unknown.

He is the most positive novelist that ever existed He anatomises without idealizing. Sometimes his portraits border on caricature; his defect is that he exaggerates and seeks out too curiously their characteristic traits. He is never false, but he dissects his model. Some of his personages are grotésque, others bizarre. There is every description of character in his works from baseness to heroism, from gaiety to terror; all stand out from the canvas, speak to the imagination, and having arrested the attention, are recognized as human, as beings who have lived, and who would still be alive if the narrator had not analyzed them to death. His portraits of women, however, exhibit an almost Shakspearian delicacy of observation. They are not women of the court, nor elegant women; they are not superhuman beings, but women. Goodness, sweetness, natural grace and a naïve majesty sur

round them with a charming halo. Their beauty and devotion lighten and console the most inaccessible retreats, solace the sorrows of the man, and pour balm upon his wounds. Moral sentiment joined to their physical beauty, patience and serenity of soul constitute their characteristics. A good housekeeper, the wife of Heathcote in the Borderers, for instance, is far more charming than all oriental sylphs, or the brilliant princesses of Calprenede; her exterior is not remarkable, her life is peaceable and humble; well-being and repose are around her; treasures of gentleness and charity are in her bosom. In a word it is a woman.

Among the numerous novels published by Cooper, that which is most characteristically original, is the "Last of the Mohicans." You would look vainly in the whole library of romance for its parallel. Smollett's or Fielding's sailors, or Scott's beggars have disappeared. The eternal family of heroes, who perpetuate themselves from fiction to fiction has vanished. You are in a new world where the original genius of the human race exists in its majesty. The child of the wilderness rises and paints himself before you. He has neither ornaments nor dress. He is alone, apart, a stranger to all civilization; master of all around him, recognizing no master himself. King of his wilderness, he has no slaves. The passions, vices, virtues of society are to him unknown. Surrounding nature is grand, like himself. She has secret pleasures for him which the rest of the world ignore. This romance so full of magic and marvellous freshness, makes us live the life of primitive solitudes, and makes us the friend of man as they nurture him.

How remarkable and true are the characters of this drama. All bear the impression of the powerful hand which traced them. The old Indian and his son are symbols of the savage life. Still more do I admire Longue Carabine, a being placed

between the wilderness and civilization; intermediate link between social industry and primitive independence. He is neither European nor wild Indian. The reflecting heroism which follows civilization, tempers the violent heroism which pervades it. If he have not quite lost the desire of vengeance and the stoicism of his fathers, he yet guesses instinctively the scrupulous demands of honor, and raises himself to a generosity whose grandeur he feels.

The Prairie contains characteristic and detailed descriptions; it is the most beautiful picture of the kind drawn by his pen. After having read it, you could fancy that you had lived on the banks of those streams, a thousand times crossed that prairie; questioned those charming scenes, and made them echo with your voice. We must add that this pleasure is purchased by an ennui caused by spinnings-out, and digressions and that this picture, so faithful, may be charged with prolixity.

The Spy has its partisans. Harvey Birch is a dramatic creation to sacrifice to one's country not only life, but honor, is the greatest of sacrifices. How can one help admiring this hero of patriotism, who makes a glory of his infamy, and inwardly consoles himself for the opprobrium which covers him, by the sentiment of what he has done for his country. As to Washington, Cooper has idealized him with great talent; a no easy matter.

The interest of the Borderers is the most powerful. The Red Rover and the Pilot are greater as maritime pictures than as romances; nor does the Water Witch yield to these latter. Everything is picturesque, energetic and yet positive. The real and magnificent are mingled.

I love Tom Coffin, king of the deep, who cannot live on land, who breathes more freely on a lake, begins to enjoy existence on the Mediterranean, and finds himself in posses

sion of all his faculties and all his happiness, only in ploughing with free keel, the vast floods of ocean.

For this man there

is no victory but that over the billows; no heroism save in the strife with them, no happiness but in this warfare. Coarse, barbarous, vulgar, he is yet great, for he represents the energy of humanity fighting with the energy of nature.

Cooper has his defects which we have not forgotten to indicate. Before him the world had never seen a novelist who was manufacturer, industriel, artisan. He materializes the interest of his best pages. If he launches a vessel, you will read a treatise on ship-building. If a rope break, you will learn how ropes are made, and by what mechanical means the accident might have been prevented. He says all, which is too much. He will not leave one detail unexplained, not a hatchway unanalyzed, nor a corner of the vessel without mentioning the wood of which she is built. Enemy of the ideal, he is like a chemist or mechanician-who must render a full account. He observes even men in this way, submitting them to a laborious and inexorable examination.

The history of his life is short. His family, originally from Buckinghamshire, England, moved to America about 1679. He was born at Burlington, on the Delaware, in 1789, and his education was commenced at Yale College, New Haven. At the age of thirteen, he entered the navy. This apprenticeship formed his spirit; here he collected the elements of those pictures so much admired. He married the daughter of Pierre de Lancy, quitted the service, and since that time has given himself up to the composition of his books. Every year came a new one. Translated into German, French, Italian, they produced a vivid sensation in Europe.

He passed a good deal of his life in Europe, especially at Paris. In England, his frankness, austerity and clearly-expressed republicanism and his national pride displeased.

In America, the same puritan sincerity, his reprobation of democratic vices, in a word, his plain-speaking, of which he was proud, and which he pushed to excess; did not help to conciliate the love of his compatriots.

Inferior in art and style to the great European romancers, there is yet a vivid historical interest attached to his works, which philosophy will never read without curiosity. There, the pure Saxon race struggles with the savages, the solitude, the desert, hunger and nature. It is the same blood, cool and persevering valor, love of gain, industry, audacity, enterprize, which marked the old Norman conquests; it is the same force without vivacity; the same sagacity without frivolity, the same ferocity towards a fighting enemy, the same pardon for the conquered, and the same faith in human power.

This indestructible permanence of races, of their soul and genius, is a magnificent spectacle for the philosopher. The Gaul of the days of Brennus, the French Canadian or the Marquis under Louis XIV., are recognizable by indelible marks—the indomitable Caradoc, Hastings in India, and Cromwell's Puritan unite in the Last of the Saxons-the American Trapper!

SECTION IX.

PAULDING-THE BROTHER JONATHAN-DOCTOR CHANNING.

To those whose claims we have just examined, we might add Joel Barlow, author of the Columbiad, a poem which has both eloquence and vigor; and Paulding, whose Dutchman's Fireside, a pleasant elegy, is a soft and enfeebled imitation of the Vicar of Wakefield; and the biographer of Brother Jonathan, a cleverly puerile writer, for whom a