gination is set on fire with the conception of adventure,
vividness and power come unbidden to his pen. The pictures he then draws
are as real to the mind as if they were actually seen by the eye. It is
doubtless due to the fact that these fits of inspiration came to him
only in certain kinds of composition, that the excellence of many of his
stories lies largely in detached scenes. Still his best works are a
moving panorama, in which the mind is no sooner sated with one picture
than its place is taken by another equally fitted to fix the attention
and to stir the heart. The genuineness of his power, in such cases, is
shown by the perfect simplicity of the agencies employed. There is no
pomp of words; there is an entire lack of even the attempt at
meretricious adornment; there is not the slightest appearance of effort
to impress the reader. In his portrayal of these scenes Cooper is like
nature, in that lie accomplishes his greatest effects with the fewest
means. If, as we are sometimes told, these things are easily done, the
pertinent question always remains, why are they not done.

Moreover, while in his higher characters he has almost (p. 283)
absolutely failed, he has succeeded in drawing a whole group of
strongly-marked lower ones. Birch, in "The Spy," Long Tom Coffin and
Boltrope in "The Pilot," the squatter in "The Prairie," Cap in "The
Pathfinder," and several others there are, any one of which would be
enough of itself to furnish a respectable reputation to many a novelist
who fancies himself far superior to Cooper as a delineator of character.
He had neither the skill nor power to draw the varied figures with which
Scott, with all the reckless prodigality of genius, crowded his canvas.
Yet in the gorgeous gallery of the great master of romantic fiction,
alive with men and women of every rank in life and of every variety of
nature, there is, perhaps, no one person who so profoundly impresses the
imagination as Cooper's crowning creation, the man of the forests. It is
not that Scott could not have done what his follower did, had he so
chosen; only that as a matter of fact he did not. Leather-Stocking is
one of the few original characters, perhaps the only great original
character, that American fiction has added to the literature of the
world.

The more uniform excellence of Cooper, however, lies in the pictures he
gives of the life of nature. Forest, ocean, and stream are the things
for which he re