In the Pioneers, Leatherstocking; is first introduced—­a philosopher of the woods, ignorant of books, but instructed in all that nature, without the aid of, science, could reveal to the man of quick senses and inquiring intellect, whose life has been passed under the open sky, and in companionship with a race whose animal perceptions are the acutest and most cultivated of which there is any example.  But Leatherstocking has higher qualities; in him there is a genial blending of the gentlest virtues of the civilized man with the better nature of the aboriginal tribes; all that in them is noble, generous, and ideal, is adopted into his own kindly character, and all that is evil is rejected.  But why should I attempt to analyse a character so familiar?  Leatherstocking is acknowledged, on all hands, to be one of the noblest, as well as most striking and original creations of fiction.  In some of his subsequent novels, Cooper—­for he had not yet Attained to the full maturity of his powers—­heightened and ennobled his first conception of the character, but in the Pioneers it dazzled the world with the splendor of novelty;

His next work was the Pilot, in which he showed how, from the vicissitudes of a life at sea, its perils and escapes, from the beauty and terrors of the great deep, from the working of a vessel on a long voyage, and from the frank, brave, and generous but peculiar character of the seaman, may be drawn materials of romance by which the minds of men may be as deeply moved as by anything in the power of romance to present.  In this walk, Cooper has had many disciples but no rival.  All who have since written romances of the sea have been but travellers in a country of which he was the great discoverer; and none of them all seemed to have loved a ship as Cooper loved it, or have been able so strongly to interest all classes of readers in its fortunes.  Among other personages drawn with great strength in the Pilot, is the general favorite, Tom Coffin, the thorough seaman with all the virtues and one or two of the infirmities of his profession, superstitious, as seamen are apt to be, yet whose superstitions strike us as but an irregular growth of his devout recognition of the Power who holds the ocean in the hollow of his hand; true-hearted, gentle, full of resources, collected in danger, and at last calmly perishing at the post of duty, with the vessel he has long guided, by what I may call a great and magnanimous death.  His rougher and coarser companion, Boltrope, is drawn with scarcely less skill, and with a no less vigorous hand.

The Pioneers is not Cooper’s best tale of the American forest, nor, the Pilot, perhaps, in all respects, his best tale of the sea; yet, if he had ceased to write here, the measure of his fame would possibly have been scarcely less ample than it now is.  Neither of them is far below the best of his productions, and in them appear the two most remarkable creations of his imagination—­two of the most remarkable characters in all fiction.