This work was published in 1826, and in the same year Cooper sailed with
his family for Europe. He left New York as one of the vessels of war,
described in his romances of the sea, goes out of port, amidst the thunder
of a parting salute from the big guns on the batteries. A dinner was given
him just before his departure, attended by most of the distinguished men
of the city, at which Peter A. Jay presided, and Dr. King addressed him in
terms which some then thought too glowing, but which would now seem
sufficiently temperate, expressing the good wishes of his friends, and
dwelling on the satisfaction they promised themselves in possessing so
illustrious a representative of American literature in the old world.
Cooper was scarcely in France when he remembered his friends of the weekly
club, and sent frequent missives to be read at its meetings; but the club
missed its founder went into a decline, and not long afterwards quietly
expired.

The first of Cooper's novels published after leaving America: was the
_Prairie_, which appeared early in 1827, a work with the admirers of which
I wholly agree. I read it with a certain awe, an undefined sense of
sublimity, such as one experiences on entering, for the first time, upon
those immense grassy deserts from which the work takes its name. The
squatter and his family--that brawny old man and his large-limbed sons,
living in a sort of primitive and patriarchal barbarism, sluggish on
ordinary occasions, but terrible when roused, like the hurricane that
sweeps the grand but monotonous wilderness in which they dwell--seem a
natural growth of ancient fields of the West. Leatherstocking, a hunter in
the _Pioneers_, a warrior in the _Last of the Mohicans_, and now, in his
extreme old age, a trapper on the prairie, declined in strength, but
undecayed in intellect, and looking to the near close of his life, and a
grave under the long grass, as calmly as the laborer at sunset looks to