with it.  Livingston was putting the finishing hand to his Report on the Penal Code of Louisiana, a work written with such grave, persuasive eloquence, that it belongs as much to our literature as to our jurisprudence.  Other contemporaneous American works there were, now less read.  Paul Allen’s poem of Noah was just laid on the counters of the booksellers.  Arden published, at the same time, in this city, a translation of Ovid’s Tristia, in heroic verse, in which the complaints of the effeminate Roman poet were rendered with great fidelity to the original, and sometimes not without beauty.  If I may speak of myself, it was in that year that I timidly intrusted to the winds and waves of public opinion a small cargo of my own—­a poem entitled The Ages, and half a dozen shorter ones, in a thin duodecimo volume, printed at Cambridge.

We had, at the same time, works of elegant literature, fresh from the press of Great Britain, which are still read and admired.  Barry Cornwall, then a young suitor for fame, published in the same year his Marcia Colonna; Byron, in the full strength and fertility of his genius, gave the readers of English his tragedy of Marino Faliero, and was in the midst of his spirited controversy with Bowles concerning the poetry of Pope.  The Spy had to sustain a comparison with Scott’s Antiquary, published simultaneously with it, and with Lockhart’s Valerius, which seems to me one of the most remarkable works of fiction ever composed.

In 1823, and in his thirty-fourth year, Cooper brought out his novel of the Pioneers, the scene of which was laid on the borders of his:  own beautiful lake.  In a recent survey of Mr; Cooper’s works, by one of his admirers, it is intimated that the reputation of this work may have been, in some degree factitious.  I cannot think so; I cannot see how such a work could fail of becoming, sooner or later, a favorite.  It was several years after its first appearance that I read the Pioneers, and I read it with a delighted astonishment.  Here, said I to myself, is the poet of rural life in this country—­our Hesiod, our Theocritus, except that he writes without the restraint of numbers, and is a greater poet than they.  In the Pioneers, as in a moving picture, are made to pass before us the hardy occupations and spirited, amusements of a prosperous settlement, in, a fertile region, encompassed for leagues around with the primeval wilderness of woods.  The seasons in their different aspects, bringing with them, their different employments; forests falling before the axe; the cheerful population, with the first mild; day of spring, engaged in the sugar orchards; the chase of the deer through the deep woods, and into the lake; turkey-shooting, during the Christmas holidays, in which the Indian marksman vied for the prize of skill with the white man; swift sleigh rides under the bright winter sun, and, perilous encounters with wild animals in the forests; these, and other scenes of rural life, drawn, as Cooper knew how to draw them, in the bright and healthful coloring of which he was master are interwoven with a regular narrative of human fortunes, not unskilfully constructed; and how could such a work be otherwise than popular?