Longfellow's celebrity in fiction is limited to _Hyperion_ and
_Kavanagh_--clever, but slight foundations for enduring popularity--as
irregular (the former at least) as Jean Paul's nondescript stories,
without the great German's tumultuous genius: Hawthorne is probably the
most noteworthy of the rising authors of America, and indeed manifests a
degree of psychological knowledge and far-sighted, deep-searching
observation of which there are few traces or none in Cooper; but the
real prowess of the author of _The Scarlet Letter_ is, we apprehend,
still undeveloped, and the harvest of his honours a thing of the future.
All these distinguished persons--not to dwell on the kindred names of
Bird, Kennedy, Ware, Paulding, Myers, Willis, Poe, Sedgwick, &c.--must
yield the palm to him who has attracted all the peoples and tongues of
Europe[Footnote: And, in _one_ instance at least, of Asia also; for _The
Spy_ was translated into Persian!] to follow out the destiny of a Spy on
the neutral ground, of a Pilot on the perilous coasts of a hostile race,
of a Last of the Mohicans disappearing before the onward tramp of the
white man.

As Rob Roy felt the pulses of life quickened when his foot was on his
native heath, so Cooper wrote with vigour and _aplomb_ only when his
themes were the aboriginal forest and the melancholy main. Pity that,
having discovered the fount of his strength--the Samson-lock by which
alone he towered above his fellows--he had not restrained himself, and
concentrated his efforts within the appointed sphere. He repudiated the
oracular counsel which his own consciousness must have approved--_Hoc
signo vinces_; and seemed to assume that whatever province he invaded,
the bulletin of the campaign would be another _Veni, vidi, vici_. Few
things can be more unsatisfactory and insipid than his attempts in the
'silver-fork school' of novel-writing--his dreary commonplaces of
fashionable life--his faded sermonisings on domestic, and political, and