_Mercedes of Castile_, published near the close of the same year, has none
of the stronger characteristics of Cooper's genius; but in the
_Deerslayer_, which appeared in 1841, another of his Leatherstocking
tales, he gave us a work rivalling the Pathfinder. Leatherstocking is
brought before us in his early youth, in the first exercise of that keen
sagacity which is blended so harmoniously with a simple and ingenuous
goodness. The two daughters of the retired freebooter dwelling on the
Otsego lake, inspire scarcely less interest than the principal personage;
Judith, in the pride of her beauty and intellect, her good impulses
contending with a fatal love of admiration, holding us fascinated with a
constant interest in her fate, which, with consummate skill, we are
permitted rather to conjecture than to know; and Hetty, scarcely less
beautiful in person, weak-minded, but wise in the midst, of that weakness
beyond the wisdom of the loftiest intellect, through the power of
conscience and religion. The character of Hetty would have been a
hazardous experiment in feebler hands, but in his it was admirably
successful.

The _Two Admirals_ and _Wing-and-Wing_ were given to the public in 1842,
both of them taking a high rank among Cooper's sea-tales. The first of
these is a sort of naval epic in prose; the flight and chase of armed
vessels hold us in breathless suspense, and the sea-fights are described
with a terrible power. In the later sea-tales of Cooper, it seems to me
that the mastery with which he makes his grand processions of events pass
before the mind's eye is even greater than in his earlier. The next year
he published the _Wyandotte or Hutted Knoll_, one of his beautiful
romances of the woods, and in 1844 two more of his sea-stories, _Afloat
and Ashore_ and _Miles Wallingford_its sequel. The long series of his
nautical tales was closed by _Jack Tier or the Florida Reef,_ published in
1848, when Cooper was in his sixtieth year, and it is as full of spirit,