But with the publication of “The Spy,” Cooper opened a thoroughly national vein, and began a literary career which showed how little native genius need rely on foreign influence or on foreign subjects.  He described the stirring events and the moral heroism of the American Revolution with patriotic sympathy and original literary power.  He touched the romantic chords of that great struggle with a delicacy which met with a world-wide response.  Not only did Americans feel that in Cooper’s novels the picturesque and characteristic features of their country were delineated by a master-hand, but in almost every European land, translations of “The Spy,” “The Pioneers,” or “The Pathfinder,” testified to the universal interest excited by the examples of simplicity, endurance, and sagacity which formed the subjects of Cooper’s pen.  In “The Pioneers,” “The Last of the Mohicans,” “The Prairie,” “The Pathfinder,” and “The Deer-slayer” figures the character of Leatherstocking, than whom no fictitious personage has a greater claim to interest.  His bravery, resolution, and woodland skill make him a type of the hardy race who pushed westward the reign of civilization.  The scenes among which he lived, the primeval forest, the great inland lakes, the hunter’s camp, and Indian wigwam were described by Cooper with a fidelity and picturesqueness which will always give to his works a national value.  Now that farms and manufacturing towns cover what a century ago was a trackless wilderness, where backwoodsmen and Indians shot bear and deer, it would be almost impossible for us to realize the previous condition of our now populous country were it not for the novels of Cooper.  And this great writer not only described the wild aspect of American scenery and the hardly less wild features of pioneer character.  He painted with equal skill the life of the American sailor, at a time when that life had an interest and excitement it no longer possesses.  Long Tom Coffin, Tom Tiller, Bob Yarn, belonged to a period when the United Stales was a maritime country, before American enterprise and industry were shut off from the sea by legislative imbecility.  No marine novelist has given a more life-like impression of a ship than Cooper, and none have excelled him in descriptions of the sea and in studies of those peculiar forms of human nature produced by life on the ocean.  So long as Cooper confined himself to purely national subjects, his success was brilliant and continuous; but many of his works show the effect of misdirected talent, and have fallen into neglect.

The “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “Rip Van Winkle” are the specimens of American fiction most intimately associated with New York.  In these stories the traditions and scenery of the Hudson River were treated by Washington Irving with all the richness of imagination and delicacy of expression of which he had so great a store.  Some part of that romantic interest afforded to the traveller by the castles of the Rhine, has been imparted to the Hudson by the exquisite pages of the “Sketch Book.”  The stories of Nathaniel P. Willis and some of the novels of Bayard Taylor and of J.G.  Holland also belong especially to New York.