o had been previously drawn in "The (p. 072)
Pioneers." But so great had been his success, and so strongly had the
characters taken hold of him, that he determined to renew the experiment
for a third time. Leather-Stocking, accordingly, was introduced as
living in extreme old age on the Western prairies, and the book ends
with his death. The idea of transferring the home of the worn-out hunter
to these vast solitudes was suggested, it is fair to infer from Cooper's
own words, by the actual career of Daniel Boone, the Kentucky pioneer.
The simple story of this man's life was sufficiently remarkable; but in
the exaggerated accounts of it that were then current, he was
represented as having emigrated, in his ninety-second year, to an estate
three hundred miles west of the Mississippi, because he found a
population of ten to the square mile inconveniently crowded.

On the 17th of May, 1827, "The Prairie" was published. It did not meet
with the extraordinary success of "The Last of the Mohicans," nor has it
ever been as great a favorite with the general public. It was written in
a far more quiet and subdued vein. It never keeps up that prolonged
strain upon the feelings which characterizes the work that preceded it,
and which while a defect in the eyes of some is to most readers its
special charm. There are, indeed, in many of Cooper's stories,
situations more thrilling and scenes more stirring than can be found in
"The Prairie," though in it there is no lack of these. But of all his
tales it is much the most poetical. Man sinks into insignificance in the
presence of these mighty solitudes; for throughout the whole book the
immensity of nature hangs over the spirit like a pall. Nor were the
characters of the principal personages out of harmony with the atmosphere
that envelopes the scenes described. In the lonely hunter, now (p. 073)
nearing his grave, there is a pathetic grandeur, which is a natural
development, and not an artificial addition. Though he has hurried as
far away as possible from the din of the settlements, he is no longer
querulous and irritable as in his old age in the Otsego hills. He has
learned to recognize the inevitable. While he does not cease to regret,
he has ceased to denounce. He knows that the majestic solitude of nature
will not long remain undisturbed, nor its more majestic silence unbroken;
for in every wind that blows from the East he hears the sound of axes and
the crash of falling tre