As Rob Roy felt the pulses of life quickened when his foot was on his native heath, so Cooper wrote with vigour and aplomb only when his themes were the aboriginal forest and the melancholy main.  Pity that, having discovered the fount of his strength—­the Samson-lock by which alone he towered above his fellows—­he had not restrained himself, and concentrated his efforts within the appointed sphere.  He repudiated the oracular counsel which his own consciousness must have approved—­Hoc signo vinces; and seemed to assume that whatever province he invaded, the bulletin of the campaign would be another Veni, vidi, vici.  Few things can be more unsatisfactory and insipid than his attempts in the ‘silver-fork school’ of novel-writing—­his dreary commonplaces of fashionable life—­his faded sermonisings on domestic, and political, and social economy.  Few things can be more inspiriting, more energetic, more impressive, than his pictures of

     ’A wet sheet and a flowing sea,
        A wind that follows fast,
      And fills the white and rustling sail,
        And bends the gallant mast;’

for we see in every stroke that the world of waters is his home, and that to his ear there is music in the wild piping of the wind, and that his eye beams afresh when it descries tempest in the horned moon, and lightning in the cloud.  To him the ocean is indeed ’a glorious mirror,’ where the form of the Highest ‘glasses itself in tempests;’ dear to him it is

------’in all time,
Calm or convulsed—­in breeze, or gale, or storm;
....Boundless, endless, and sublime—­
The image of Eternity—­the throne
Of the Invisible.’

Well might one who had lived six years on her swelling bosom, combine with his love ‘of the old sea some reverential fear,’ as Wordsworth has it.  This compound feeling is highly effective in his marine fictions, so instinct is it with the reality of personal experience.  Mr Griswold tells us that Cooper informed him as follows of the origin of The Pilot:  ’Talking with the late Charles Wilkes of New York, a man of taste and judgment, our author [Cooper] heard extolled the universal knowledge of Scott, and the sea-portions of The Pirate cited as a proof.  He laughed at the idea, as most seamen would, and the discussion ended by his promising to write a sea-story which could be read by landsmen, while seamen should feel its truth. The Pilot was the result of that conversation.’[Footnote:  ‘The Prose-Writers of America.’] Of this tale Scott says, in a letter to Miss Edgeworth:  ’I have seen a new work, The Pilot, by the author of The Spy and The Pioneers.  The hero is the celebrated Paul Jones, whom I well remember advancing above the island of Inchkeith, with three small vessels, to lay Leith under contribution....  The novel is a very clever one, and the sea-scenes and characters in particular are admirably drawn; and I advise you to read it as soon as possible.’