It was while he was in the midst of these litigations, that he published, in 1840, the Pathfinder.  People had begun to think of him as a controversialist, acute, keen, and persevering, occupied with his personal wrongs and schemes of attack and defence.  They were startled from this estimate of his character by the moral duty of that glorious work—­I must so call it; by the vividness and force of its delineations, by the unspoiled love of nature apparent in every page, and by the fresh and warm emotions which everywhere gave life to the narrative and the dialogue.  Cooper was now in his fifty-first year, but nothing which he had produced in the earlier part of his literary life was written with so much of what might seem the generous fervor of youth, or showed the faculty of invention in higher vigor.  I recollect that near the time of its appearance I was informed of an observation made upon it by one highly distinguished in the literature of our country and of the age, between whom and the author an unhappy coolness had for some years existed.  As he finished the reading of the Pathfinder, he exclaimed, “They may say what they will of Cooper; the man who wrote this book is not only a great man, but a good man.”

The readers of the Pathfinder were quickly reconciled to the fourth appearance of Leatherstocking, when they saw him made to act a different part from any which the author had hitherto assigned him—­when they saw him shown as a lover, and placed in the midst of associations which invested his character with a higher and more affecting heroism.  In this work are two female characters, portrayed in a masterly manner,—­the corporal’s daughter, Mabel Dunham, generous, resolute, yet womanly, and the young Indian woman, called by her tribe the Dew of June, a personification of female truth, affection, and sympathy, with a strong aboriginal cast, yet a product of nature as bright and pure as that from which she is named.

Mercedes of Castile, published near the close of the same year, has none of the stronger characteristics of Cooper’s genius; but in the Deerslayer, which appeared in 1841, another of his Leatherstocking tales, he gave us a work rivalling the Pathfinder.  Leatherstocking is brought before us in his early youth, in the first exercise of that keen sagacity which is blended so harmoniously with a simple and ingenuous goodness.  The two daughters of the retired freebooter dwelling on the Otsego lake, inspire scarcely less interest than the principal personage; Judith, in the pride of her beauty and intellect, her good impulses contending with a fatal love of admiration, holding us fascinated with a constant interest in her fate, which, with consummate skill, we are permitted rather to conjecture than to know; and Hetty, scarcely less beautiful in person, weak-minded, but wise in the midst, of that weakness beyond the wisdom of the loftiest intellect, through the power of conscience and religion.  The character of Hetty would have been a hazardous experiment in feebler hands, but in his it was admirably successful.