y in this country. In England the novel was called "The
Borderers;" in France "The Puritans of America, or the Valley of
Wish-ton-Wish." This work was begun during his residence in Switzerland
in 1828, and was completed at Florence. It has never been popular,
particularly in America. The tale is a tragic one throughout, and the
prevailing air of sombreness is rarely lightened by any success in the
management of minor incidents. The introduction too was marked by (p. 075)
one of Cooper's besetting faults, intolerable prolixity. But the main
cause of his failure lay in his inability to delineate the Puritan
character. It was not knowledge that was wanting, it was sympathy; or
perhaps it is better to say that it was his lack of sympathy which
prevented his having any genuine knowledge. He tried in all honesty to
depict the men who had founded New England, the men of hard heads and
iron hearts, in whom piety and pugnacity were, as in himself, so
intimately blended that the transition from the one to the other is a
vanishing line whose discovery defies the closest scrutiny. Paradoxical
as the assertion may seem, he was too much like the Puritans to do them
justice. His character was essentially the same as their own; but the
influences under which he had been trained were altogether different.
Upon their manners, their ideas, and even their appearance he had early
learned to look with aversion; and he had not the power to project his
mind out of the circle of notions and prejudices in which he had been
brought up. The very name of the Reverend Meek Wolf which he bestowed in
this story upon his clergyman, revealed of itself the existence of
feelings which put him at once out of that pale of sympathetic thought,
which enables the novelist or historian to look with the insight of the
spirit upon men and motives which his intellect acting by itself would
prompt him to distrust and dislike.

To this tale succeeded "The Water Witch." This was begun at Sorrento and
finished at Rome, a city which he subsequently used often to speak of as
the precise moral antipodes of the capital of the New World, in the
harbor of which he had laid much of the scene of this story. It (p. 076)
was not till he reached Dresden, however, that he was enabled to have
it put in print. On the 11th of December, 1830, it made its appearance
in this country. With it ended for a time his fictions that dealt with
American life and manners. He now turned to ne