of villain and hero, predicament and escape, renewed crisis and
rescue, mystification and explanation, worthy of a third-rate
novelist. His salvation lies in his genius for action, the beauty
and grandeur of his landscapes, the primitive veracity of his
children of nature. Cooper was an elemental man, and he
comprehended, by means of something deeper than mere artistic
instinct, the feelings of elemental humanity in the presence of
the wide ocean or of the deep woods. He is as healthy and sane as
Fielding, and he possesses an additional quality which all of the
purely English novelists lack. It was the result of his youthful
sojourn in the wilderness. Let us call it the survival in him of
an aboriginal imagination. Cooper reminds one somehow of a
moose--an ungraceful creature perhaps, but indubitably big, as
many a hunter has suddenly realized when he has come unexpectedly
upon a moose that whirled to face him in the twilight silence of
a northern wood.

Something of this far-off and gigantic primitivism inheres also
in the poetry of William Cullen Bryant. His portrait, with the
sweeping white beard and the dark folds of the cloak, suggests
the Bard as the Druids might have known him. But in the
eighteen-thirties and forties, Mr. Bryant's alert, clean-shaven
face, and energetic gait as he strode down Broadway to the
"Evening Post" office, suggested little more than a vigorous and
somewhat radical editor of an increasingly prosperous Democratic
newspaper. There was nothing of the Fringed Gentian or Yellow
Violet about him. Like so many of the Knickerbockers, Bryant was
an immigrant to New York; in fact, none of her adopted men of
letters have represented so perfectly the inherited traits of the
New England Puritan. To understand his long, and honorable public