d whole. For once, whether from greater care or happier
inspiration, Cooper discarded those features of his writings in which he
had either failed entirely, or achieved, at the most, slight success.
The leading characters belonged to the class which he drew best, so far
as he was a delineator of character at all. Here were no pasteboard
figures like Heywood in "The Last of the Mohicans," or Middleton in "The
Prairie." Here were no supernumeraries dragged in, in a vain effort to
amuse, as the singing-master in the former of these same stories, or the
naturalist in the latter. Humor, Cooper certainly had; but it is the
humor that gleams in fitful flashes from the men of earnest purposes and
serious lives, and gives a momentary relief to the sternness and
melancholy of their natures. The power of producing an entire (p. 240)
humorous creation he had not at all, and almost the only thing that mars
the perfectness of "The Pathfinder" is the occasional effort to make one
out of Muir, the character designed to play the part of a villain. But
the defects in both these tales are comparatively slight. The plot in
each is simple, but it gives plenty of room for the display of those
qualities in which Cooper excelled. The scene of the one was laid on
Lake Ontario and its shores; the other, on the little lake near which he
had made his home; and the whole atmosphere of both is redolent of the
beauty and the wildness of nature.

These works were a revelation to the men who had begun to despair of
Cooper's ever accomplishing again anything worthy of his early renown.
They were pure works of art. No moral was everlastingly perking itself
in the reader's face, no labored lecture to prove what was self-evident
interrupted the progress of the story. There is scarcely an allusion to
any of the events which had checkered the novelist's career. References
to contemporary occurrences are so slight that they would pass unheeded
by any one whose attention had not been called beforehand to their
existence. These works showed what Cooper was capable of when he gave
full play to his powers, and did not fancy he was writing a novel when
he was indulging in lectures upon manners and customs. "It is beautiful,
it is grand," said Balzac to a friend, speaking of "The Pathfinder."
"Its interest is tremendous. He surely owed us this masterpiece after
the last two or three rhapsodies he has been giving us. You must read
it. I know no one in the world,