To-day we assemble for a sadder purpose: to pay to the dead some part of
the honors then intended for the living. We bring our offering, but he is
not here who should receive it; in his stead are vacancy and silence;
there is no eye to brighten at our words, and no voice to answer. "It is
an empty office that we perform," said Virgil, in his melodious verses,
when commemorating the virtues of the young Marcellus, and bidding flowers
be strewn, with full hands, over his early grave. We might apply the
expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part only. We
can no longer do anything for him who is departed, but we may do what will
not be without fruit to those who remain. It is good to occupy our
thoughts with the example of great talents in conjunction with great
virtues. His genius has passed away with him; but we may learn, from the
history of his life, to employ the faculties we possess with useful
activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous frankness, his
disdain of everything that wears the faintest semblance of deceit, his
refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage with which, on all
occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and combated what he thought
error.

The circumstances of Cooper's early life were remarkably suited to confirm
the natural hardihood and manliness of his character, and to call forth
and exercise that extraordinary power of observation, which accumulated
the materials afterwards wielded and shaped by his genius. His father,
while an inhabitant of Burlington, in New Jersey, on the pleasant banks of
the Delaware, was the owner of large possessions on the borders of the
Otsego Lake in our own state, and here, in the newly-cleared fields, he
built, in 1786, the first house in Cooperstown. To this home, Cooper, who
was born in Burlington, in the year 1789, was conveyed in his infancy, and
here, as he informs us in his preface to the _Pioneers_, his first
impressions of the external world were obtained. Here he passed his