488

"Work Away," 533

Yeast: A Problem.--_By the author of "Alton Locke,"_ 160

THE INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE

_Of Literature, Art, and Science._

Vol. III NEW-YORK. APRIL 1, 1851. No. I

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.

[Illustration]

The readers of the _International_ have in the above engraving, from a
Daguerreotype by Brady, the best portrait ever published of an
illustrious countryman of ours, who, as a novelist, take him all in all,
is entitled to precedence of every other now living. "With what amazing
power," exclaims Balzac, in the _Revue de Paris_, "has he painted
nature! how all his pages glow with creative fire! Who is there writing
English among our contemporaries, if not of him, of whom it can be said
that he has a genius of the first order?" And the _Edinburgh Review_
says, "The empire of the sea, has been conceded to him by acclamation;"
that, "in the lonely desert or untrodden prairie, among the savage
Indians or scarcely less savage settlers, all equally acknowledge his
dominion. 'Within this circle none dares walk but he.'" And Christopher
North, in the _Noctes_: "He writes like a hero!" And beyond the limits
of his own country, every where, the great critics assign him a place
among the foremost of the illustrious authors of the age. In each of the
departments of romantic, fiction in which he has written, he has had
troops of imitators, and in not one of them an equal. Writing not from
books, but from nature, his descriptions, incidents, and characters, are
as fresh as the fields of his triumphs. His Harvey Birch, Leather
Stocking, Long Tom Coffin, and other heroes, rise before the mind, each
in his clearly defined and peculiar lineaments, as striking original
_creations_, as actual persons. His infinitely varied descriptions of
the ocean, ships gliding like beings of the air upon its surface, vast
solitary wildernesses, and indeed all his delineations of nature, are
instinct with the breath of poetry; he is both the Horace Vernet and the
Claude Lorraine of novelists; and through all his works are sentiments
of genuine courtesy and honor, and an unobtrusive and therefore more
powerful assertion of natural rights and dignity.

WILLIAM COOPER, the emigrant ancestor of JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, arrived
in this country in 1679, and settled at Burlington, New Jersey. He
immediately took an active part