Here we have, at last, the whip-poor-will, an American bird, and not the conventional lark or nightingale, although the elves of the Old World seem scarcely at home on the banks of the Hudson.  Drake’s memory has been kept fresh not only by his own poetry, but by the beautiful elegy written by his friend Fitz-Greene Halleck, the first stanza of which is universally known;

  “Green be the turf above thee,
    Friend of my better days;
  None knew thee but to love thee,
    Nor named thee but to praise.”

Halleck was born in Guilford, Connecticut, whither he retired in 1849, and resided there till his death in 1867.  But his literary career is identified with New York.  He was associated with Drake in writing the Croaker Papers, a series of humorous and satirical verses contributed in 1814 to the Evening Post.  These were of a merely local and temporary interest; but Halleck’s fine ode, Marco Bozzaris—­though declaimed until it has become hackneyed—­gives him a sure title to remembrance; and his Alnwick Castle, a monody, half serious and half playful on the contrast between feudal associations and modern life, has much of that pensive lightness which characterizes Praed’s best vers de societe.

A friend of Drake and Halleck was James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the first American novelist of distinction, and, if a popularity which has endured for nearly three quarters of a century is any test, still the most successful of all American novelists.  Cooper was far more intensely American than Irving, and his books reached an even wider public.  “They are published as soon as he produces them,” said Morse, the electrician, in 1833, “in thirty-four different places in Europe.  They have been seen by American travelers in the languages of Turkey and Persia, in Constantinople, in Egypt, at Jerusalem, at Ispahan.”  Cooper wrote altogether too much; he published, besides his fictions, a Naval History of the United States, a series of naval biographies, works of travel, and a great deal of controversial matter.  He wrote over thirty novels, the greater part of which are little better than trash, and tedious trash at that.  This is especially true of his tendenz novels and his novels of society.  He was a man of strongly marked individuality, fiery, pugnacious, sensitive to criticism, and abounding in prejudices.  He was embittered by the scurrilous attacks made upon him by a portion of the American press, and spent a great deal of time and energy in conducting libel suits against the newspapers.  In the same spirit he used fiction as a vehicle for attack upon the abuses and follies of American life.  Nearly all of his novels, written with this design, are worthless.  Nor was Cooper well equipped by nature and temperament for depicting character and passion in social life.  Even in his best romances his heroines and his “leading juveniles”—­to borrow a term from the amateur stage—­are insipid and conventional.  He was no satirist, and his humor was not of a high order.  He was a rapid and uneven writer, and, unlike Irving, he had no style.