n's works have been
rendered by the labors of their scholars, the sorrow of that loss which we
deplore is now diffusing itself. Here we lament the ornament of our
country, there they mourn the death of him who delighted the human race.
Even now, while I speak, the pulse of grief which is passing through the
nations has haply just reached some remote neighborhood; the news of his
death has been brought to some dwelling on the slopes of the Andes, or
amidst the snowy wastes of the North, and the dark-eyed damsel of Chile,
or the fair-haired maid of Norway, is sad to think that he whose stories
of heroism and true love have so often kept her for hours from her pillow,
lives no more.

He is gone! but the creations of his genius, fixed in living words,
survive the frail material organs by which the words were first traced.
They partake of a middle nature, between the deathless mind and the
decaying body of which they are the common offspring, and are, therefore,
destined to a duration, if not eternal, yet indefinite. The examples he
has given in his glorious fictions, of heroism, honor, and truth, of large
sympathies between man and man, of all that is good, great, and excellent,
embodied in personages marked with so strong an individuality that we
place them among our friends and favorites; his frank and generous men,
his gentle and noble women, shall live through centuries to come, and only
perish with our language. I have said with our language; but who shall say
when it may be the fate of the English language to be numbered with the
extinct forms of human speech? Who shall declare which of the present
tongues of the civilized world will survive its fellows? It may be that
some one of them, more fortunate than the rest, will long outlast them, in
some undisturbed quarter of the globe, and in the midst of a new
civilization. The creations of Cooper's genius, even now transferred to
that language, may remain to be the delight of the nations through another
great cycle of centuries, beginning after the English language and its
contemporaneous form of civilization shall have passed away.

Preface to the New Edition

This book originally owed its existence to an accident, and it was printed
under circumstances that prevented the usual supervision of the press by
the author. The consequences were many defects in plot, style, and
arrangement, that were entirely owing to precipitation and inexperience;
and quite as ma