Such are the works so widely read, and so universally admired, in all the zones of the globe, and by men of every kindred and every tongue; works which have made of those who dwell in remote latitudes, wanderers in our forests, and observers of our manners, and have inspired them with an interest in our history.  A gentleman who had returned from Europe just before the death of Cooper, was asked what he found the people of the Continent doing.  “They all are reading Cooper,” he answered; “in the little kingdom of Holland, with its three millions of inhabitants, I looked into four different translations of Cooper in the language of the country.”  A traveller, who has seen much of the middle classes of Italy, lately said to me, “I found that all they knew of America, and that was not little, they had learned from Cooper’s novels; from him they had learned the story of American liberty, and through him they had been introduced to our Washington; they had read his works till the shores of the Hudson, and the valleys of Westchester, and the banks of Otsego lake, had become to them familiar ground.”

Over all the countries into whose speech this great man’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.