energy, invention, life-like presentation of objects and events--

The vision and the faculty divine--

as anything he has written.

Let me pause here to say that Cooper, though not a manufacturer of verse,
was in the highest sense of the word a poet; his imagination wrought nobly
and grandly, and imposed its creations on the mind of the reader for
realities. With him there was no withering, or decline, or disuse of the
poetic faculty; as he stepped downwards from the zenith of life, no shadow
or chill came over it; it was like the year of some genial climates, a
perpetual season of verdure, bloom, and fruitfulness. As these works came
out, I was rejoiced to see that he was unspoiled by the controversies in
which he had allowed, himself to become engaged; that they had not given
to these better expressions of his genius, any tinge of misanthropy, or
appearance of contracting and closing sympathies any trace of an interest
in his fellow-beings less large and free than in his earlier works.

Before the, appearance of his _Jack Tier_, Cooper published, in 1845 and
the following year, a series of novels relating to the Anti-rent question,
in which he took great interest. He thought that the disposition
manifested in certain quarters to make con cessions, to what he deemed a
denial of the rights of property was a first step in a most dangerous
path. To discourage this disposition, he wrote _Satanstoe, The
Chainbearer,_ and _The Redskins_. They are didactic in their design, and
want the freedom of invention which belongs to Cooper's best novels; but
if they had been written by anybody but Cooper,--by a member of Congress,
for example, or an eminent politician of any class,--they would have made
his reputation. It was said, I am told, by a distinguished jurist of our