t he writes
without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet than they. In the
_Pioneers_, as in a moving picture, are made to pass before us the hardy
occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous settlement, in, a
fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with the primeval
wilderness of woods. The seasons in their different aspects, bringing with
them, their different employments; forests falling before the axe; the
cheerful population, with the first mild; day of spring, engaged in the
sugar orchards; the chase of the deer through the deep woods, and into the
lake; turkey-shooting, during the Christmas holidays, in which the Indian
marksman vied for the prize of skill with the white man; swift sleigh
rides under the bright winter sun, and, perilous encounters with wild
animals in the forests; these, and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as
Cooper knew how to draw them, in the bright and healthful coloring of
which he was master are interwoven with a regular narrative of human
fortunes, not unskilfully constructed; and how could such a work be
otherwise than popular?

In the _Pioneers_, Leatherstocking; is first introduced--a philosopher of
the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without
the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring
intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in
companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and
most cultivated of which there is any example. But Leatherstocking has
higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest
virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal
tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into
his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected. But why should
I attempt to analyse a character so familiar? Leatherstocking is
acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most
striking and original creations of fiction. In some of his subsequent
novels, Cooper--for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his
powers--heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character,
but in the _Pioneers_ it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;

His next work was the _Pilot_, in which he showed how, from the
vicissitudes of a life at sea, its perils and escapes, from the beauty and
terrors of the great deep, from the working of a vessel on a long voyage,
and fr