adventure and endeavour must end fatally in inheritance and marriage. For
James Fenimore Cooper nature was not the frame-work, it was an essential
part of existence. He could hear its voice, he could understand its
silence, and he could interpret both for us in his prose with all that
felicity and sureness of effect that belong to a poetical conception
alone. His fame, as wide but less brilliant than that of his
contemporary, rests mostly on a novel which is not of the sea. But he
loved the sea and looked at it with consummate understanding. In his sea
tales the sea inter-penetrates with life; it is in a subtle way a factor
in the problem of existence, and, for all its greatness, it is always in
touch with the men, who, bound on errands of war or gain, traverse its
immense solitudes. His descriptions have the magistral ampleness of a
gesture indicating the sweep of a vast horizon. They embrace the colours
of sunset, the peace of starlight, the aspects of calm and storm, the
great loneliness of the waters, the stillness of watchful coasts, and the
alert readiness which marks men who live face to face with the promise
and the menace of the sea.

He knows the men and he knows the sea. His method may be often faulty,
but his art is genuine. The truth is within him. The road to legitimate
realism is through poetical feeling, and he possesses that--only it is
expressed in the leisurely manner of his time. He has the knowledge of
simple hearts. Long Tom Coffin is a monumental seaman with the
individuality of life and the significance of a type. It is hard to
believe that Manual and Borroughcliffe, Mr. Marble of Marble-Head,
Captain Tuck of the packet-ship _Montauk_, or Daggett, the tenacious
commander of the _Sea Lion_ of Martha's Vineyard, must pass away some day
and be utterly forgotten. His sympathy is large, and his humour is as
genuine--and as perfectly unaffected--as is his art. In certain passages
he reaches, very simply, the heights of inspired vision.