this is Cooper's weakness in character-drawing-a weakness which sets him once more below Scott, and far below writers like Balzac and Thackeray. Of course we must remember that he was writing romances and not character novels; yet it is a pity that, aside from two or three fairly life-like creations, his characters, especially his women, are little better than puppets. They talk, but their talk is pedantic and labored. Their virtues and vices are hung on them like so much wearing apparel.

But while these things condemn Cooper, as a literary artist, to an inferior rank, they can not be held to condemn him utterly. Even his style is not so bad as it is someGreatness. times painted: so long as he is writing narrative and not dialogue it is really remarkable for firmness and ease. Moreover, in his best work, his minor defects in this respect and others, are to a great extent obscured by his virtues-by the absorbing interest of his thrilling situations, by the commanding presence of his able-bodied and large-hearted heroes, and by the poetical glamour which, through his real genius for description, he has succeeded in throwing over nearly every scene. Let two pages, taken from the quietest part of The Last of the Mohicans, speak for some qualities of his art:

While Heyward and his companions hesitated to approach a building so decayed, Hawkeye and the Indians entered within the low walls, not only without fear, but with obvious interest. While the former surveyed the ruins, both internally and externally, with the curiosity of one whose recollections were reviving at each moment, Chingachgook related to his son, in the language of the Delawares, and with the pride of a conqueror, the brief history of the skirmish which had been fought in his youth in that secluded spot. A strain of melancholy, however, blended with his triumph, rendering his voice, as usual, soft and musical.

In the meantime the sisters gladly dismounted, and prepared to enjoy their halt in the coolness of the evening, and in a security which they believed nothing but the beasts of the forest could invade.

"Would not our resting place have been more retired, my worthy friend," demanded the more vigilant Duncan, perceiving that the scout had already finished his short survey, "had we chosen a spot less known and one more rarely visited than this?"

"Few live who know the block-house was ever raised," was the slow and musing answer; "tis not often that books are made, and narratives written, of such a scrimmage as was here fou't atween the Mohicans and the Mohawks, in a war of their own waging. I was then a younker and went out with the Delawares, because I knew they were a scandalized and wronged race. Forty days and forty nights did the imps crave our blood around this pile of logs, which I designed and partly reared, being, as you'll remember, no Indian myself, but a man without a cross. The Delawares lent themselves to the work and we made it good, ten to twenty, until our numbers were nearly equal, and then we sallied out upon the hounds, and not a man of them ever got back to tell the fate of his party. Yes, yes; I was then young and new to the sight of blood; and not relishing the thought that creatures who had spirits like myself should lay on the naked ground, to be torn asunder by beasts or to bleach in the rains, I buried the dead with my own hands, under that very little hillock where you have placed yourselves; and no bad seat does it make, neither, though it be raised by the bones of mortal men.”

Heyward and the sisters arose, on the instant, from the grassy sepulchre; nor could the two latter, notwithstanding the terrific scenes they had so recently passed through, entirely suppress an emotion of natural horror, when they found themselves in such familiar contact with the grave of the dead Mohawks. The gray light, the gloomy little area of dark grass, surrounded by its border of brush, beyond which the pines rose, in breathing silence, apparently, into the very clouds, and the deathlike stillness of the vast forest, were all in unison to deepen such a sensation.

"They are gone, and they are harmless," continued Hawkeye, waving his hand, with a melancholy smile, at their manifest alarm; "they'll never shout the war-whoop nor strike a blow with the tomahawk again! And of all those who aided in placing them where they lie, Chingachgook and I only are living! The brothers and family of the Mohican formed our war party; and you see before you all that are now left of his race."

The eyes of the listeners involuntarily sought the forms of the Indians, with a compassionate interest in their desolate fortune. Their dark persons were still to be seen within the shadows of the

block-house, the son listening to the relation of his father with that sort of intenseness which would be created by a narrative that redounded so much to the honor of those whose names he had long revered for their courage and savage virtues.

"I had thought the Delawares a pacific people,' " said Duncan, "and that they never waged war in person; trusting the defence of their lands to those very Mohawks that you slew!"

""Tis true in part," returned the scout, "and yet, at the bottom, 'tis a wicked lie. Such a treaty was made in ages gone by, through the deviltries of the Dutchers, who wished to disarm the natives that had the best right to the country, where they had settled themselves. The Mohicans, though a part of the same nation, having to deal with the English, never entered into the silly bargain, but kept to their manhood; as in truth did the Delawares, when their eyes were opened to their folly. You see before you a chief of the great Mohican Sagamores! Once his family could chase their deer over tracks of country wider than that which belongs to the Albany Patterroon, without crossing brook or hill that was not their own; but what is left to their descendant! He may find his six feet of earth when God chooses, and keep it in peace, perhaps, if he has a friend who will take the pains to sink his head so low that the plowshares cannot reach it!"

Cooper's place is clear as a writer in the field of strictly legitimate romance—the romance of real life, of stirring adventure and daring deeds, made romantic simply by their inaccessibility to most men at most times. His kinship is with Scott and Stevenson and all large, healthy, out-of-door natures. Moreover, he has some claim to consideration among writers of universal interest in virtue of the elemental passions with which he deals, for the fashions of human heroism do not change. Had his insight and his art been equal to his idealizing imagination, he would have been second to no writer of modern romance. His old trapper stands upright in the deathhour and answers "Here" as Colonel Newcome answers "Adsum!" David Gaunt goes forth to battle like David of old, with a sling in his hand and a song on his lips. The mourning of the Delawares over the body of Uncas reminds

us of the mourning of the Trojans ove Leather-Stocking straps the aged Chin and carries him out of the forest-fire chises out of burning Troy.

the body of Hector. ichgook on his back Eneas carried Anfundamental concepKill-deer suggests a

Indeed, th tion of Leather-Stocking and his rif comparison with Odysseus and his bow or King Arthur and his good sword Excalibur. But we may not make the comparison. We can only deplore the fatal defects that marred a genius which might otherwise have set at the beginning of our literature an epic worthy to stand by the epics of the old world.

EARLY POETRY

That the genius of poetry in America was even more slow to respond to the creative impulse than the genius of prose romance, is made evident by the story of the publication of Bryant's Thanatopsis. When, in 1817, the manuscript of that poem appeared in the office of the North American Review of Boston-a magazine then but two years old, yet already a criterion of literary taste-it caused no little commotion. Mr. Dana, the most sagacious of the young editors, declared that it could not have been written in America, and would consent to publish it only upon the mistaken assurance of his colleague that Dr. Bryant, the poet's father, then at Boston as senator to the state legislature, was its author. Nor was Mr. Dana's caution unjustified. It is true that nothing could be greatly better in its modest way than Freneau's Wild Honeysuckle, written long before, but it is also true that that lyric was, as one of its admirers has called it, little more than a "first

stammer." * American poetry became fairly articulate only with Thanatopsis. But the young author of 1817 was still quite unknown to fame, and the part that he was to play in American poetry reaches so far through the nineteenth cen

*Greenough White: Philosophy of American Literature.

tury that it will be well here, before considering him, to glance at a few of his contemporaries whose work was associated exclusively with the early decades.

Washington Allston, 1779-1843.

John Pier

pont,

1785-1866.

There is perhaps little to keep alive in literary history the names of such men as Washington Allston and John Pierpont except the fact that they published collections of poetry before Bryant. Allston, who is remembered still as a painter, studied art abroad, and had the good fortune while at Rome to become intimate with Coleridge. At Boston, where he resided, he exercised a deep influence upon early art and culture in New England. He published a volume of refined verse, The Sylphs of the Seasons, in 1813. Pierpont, who was a Unitarian clergyman of Connecticut, published several volumes of poems, the first in 1816. Many of his verses, such as Warren's Address to the American Soldiers ("Stand! the ground's your own, my braves!"), had a touch of grandiloquence in them that made them favorites for recitation. The spirit of the Revolution survived long in poetry of this

nature.

Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck, whose names are inseparably associated, and who belonged to the New York group of writers, are two minor poets still held in something like affectionate remembrance. Drake, the younger, showed perhaps the greater promise, but he died of consump

man Drake, 1795-1820.

tion at the age of twenty-five. He was a youth Joseph Rod- of many graces of both body and mind, who wrote verses as a bird sings, for the pure joy of it. His fame, as well as Halleck's, was made by what was locally known as "The Croakers". -a series of forty poems contributed by them in 1819 to the New York Evening Post, and signed "Croaker & Co." Among these was The American Flag ("When Freedom from her mountain height”),