ended by his promising to write a sea-story which could be read by
landsmen, while seamen should feel its truth. _The Pilot_ was the result
of that conversation.'[Footnote: 'The Prose-Writers of America.'] Of
this tale Scott says, in a letter to Miss Edgeworth: 'I have seen a new
work, _The Pilot_, by the author of _The Spy_ and _The Pioneers_. The
hero is the celebrated Paul Jones, whom I well remember advancing above
the island of Inchkeith, with three small vessels, to lay Leith under
contribution.... The novel is a very clever one, and the sea-scenes and
characters in particular are admirably drawn; and I advise you to read
it as soon as possible.' Still higher panegyric would not have been
misbestowed in this instance, which illustrates Mr Prescott's remark,
that Cooper's descriptions of inanimate nature, no less than of savage
man, are alive with the breath of poetry--'Witness his infinitely
various pictures of the ocean; or, still more, of the beautiful spirit
that rides upon its bosom, the gallant ship.' Though it is to _The
Pilot_, pre-eminently, and _The Waterwitch_, in nearly an equal degree,
that these remarks apply, there is many a passage in Cooper's later
novels--for example, _The Two Admirals, Homeward Bound, Mark's Reef,
Ashore and Afloat_, and _The Sea-Lions_--in which we recognise the same
'cunning' right hand which pencilled the _Ariel_, and its crew, the
moody, mysterious pilot, and stalwart Long Tom Coffin.

Nor was he less at home in the backwoods and prairies of his fatherland,
than upon the broad seas which divide it from the Old World. Tastes
differ; and there are those--possibly the majority of his readers--who
prefer the Indian associations of _The Last of the Mohicans, The
Pioneers_, &c. to the salt-water scenery of the other class of works.
For our part, we prefer his prairies to his savages, his forests to his
aborigines, his inanimate to his living sketches of Indian story. His
wild men of the woods are often too sentimental, too dreamy, too ideal.