Commentators on the life and work of Philip Pendleton Cooke have often found it useful to compare him with John Keats. An enormously promising young lyric poet and a handsome, intelligent man, Cooke died before he could accomplish more than a small portion of what was expected of him. Raised in the Shenandoah Valley, Cooke was an accomplished, avid outdoorsman. His love of nature, combined with his interest in the writing of his own time and the medieval romances which so absorbed him, make him one of the early southern romantics.

Cooke was the quintessential Virginian. His father, John Rogers Cooke, born in Bermuda in 1788, immigrated to Martinsburg, Virginia, in Berkeley County about 1810, practiced law, and in 1813 married Maria Pendleton. John Cooke's own family was one of considerable reknown; his two brothers were John Esten, a figure in both medicine and in the ministry, and Philip St. George...