The Two Admirals and Wing-and-Wing were given to the public in 1842, both of them taking a high rank among Cooper’s sea-tales.  The first of these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described with a terrible power.  In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me that the mastery with which he makes his grand processions of events pass before the mind’s eye is even greater than in his earlier.  The next year he published the Wyandotte or Hutted Knoll, one of his beautiful romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, Afloat and Ashore and Miles Wallingfordits sequel.  The long series of his nautical tales was closed by Jack Tier or the Florida Reef, published in 1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit, energy, invention, life-like presentation of objects and events—­

    The vision and the faculty divine—­

as anything he has written.

Let me pause here to say that Cooper, though not a manufacturer of verse, was in the highest sense of the word a poet; his imagination wrought nobly and grandly, and imposed its creations on the mind of the reader for realities.  With him there was no withering, or decline, or disuse of the poetic faculty; as he stepped downwards from the zenith of life, no shadow or chill came over it; it was like the year of some genial climates, a perpetual season of verdure, bloom, and fruitfulness.  As these works came out, I was rejoiced to see that he was unspoiled by the controversies in which he had allowed, himself to become engaged; that they had not given to these better expressions of his genius, any tinge of misanthropy, or appearance of contracting and closing sympathies any trace of an interest in his fellow-beings less large and free than in his earlier works.

Before the, appearance of his Jack Tier, Cooper published, in 1845 and the following year, a series of novels relating to the Anti-rent question, in which he took great interest.  He thought that the disposition manifested in certain quarters to make con cessions, to what he deemed a denial of the rights of property was a first step in a most dangerous path.  To discourage this disposition, he wrote Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins.  They are didactic in their design, and want the freedom of invention which belongs to Cooper’s best novels; but if they had been written by anybody but Cooper,—­by a member of Congress, for example, or an eminent politician of any class,—­they would have made his reputation.  It was said, I am told, by a distinguished jurist of our state, that they entitled the author to as high a place in law as his other works had won for him in literature.

I had thought, in meditating the plan of this discourse, to mention all the works of Mr. Cooper, but the length to which I have found it extending has induced me to pass over several written in the last ten years of his life, and to confine myself to those which best illustrate his literary character.  The last of his novels was The Ways of the Hour, a work in which the objections he entertained to the trial by jury in civil causes were stated in the form of a narrative.