ts, selected Cooper's novels for attack. Every grammar
school teacher is ready to point out that his style is often prolix
and his sentences are sometimes ungrammatical. Amateurs even criticize
Cooper's seamanship, although it seemed impeccable to Admiral Mahan. No
doubt one must admit the "helplessness, propriety, and incapacity" of
most of Cooper's women, and the dreadfulness of his bores, particularly
the Scotchmen, the doctors, and the naturalists. Like Sir Walter, Cooper
seems to have taken but little pains in the deliberate planning of his
plots. Frequently he accepts a ready-made formula of villain and hero,
predicament and escape, renewed crisis and rescue, mystification and
explanation, worthy of a third-rate novelist. His salvation lies in
his genius for action, the beauty and grandeur of his landscapes, the
primitive veracity of his children of nature. Cooper was an elemental
man, and he comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere
artistic instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in the presence
of the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and sane as
Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the purely
English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful sojourn in
the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of an aboriginal
imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a moose--an ungraceful
creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as many a hunter has suddenly
realized when he has come unexpectedly upon a moose that whirled to face
him in the twilight silence of a northern wood.

Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also in the
poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the sweeping white
beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests the Bard as the Druids
might have known him. But in the eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr.
Bryant's alert, clean-shaven face, and energetic gait as he strode down
Broadway to the "Evening Post" office, suggested little more than a
vigorous and somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous
Democratic newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow
Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was an
immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of letters
have represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the New England
Puritan. To understand his long, and honorable public life it is
necessary to know something of the city of his choice, but to