can to find fault with the laudatory tone of a
work which reflects the ardent love of country felt by the writer. Yet
in many respects it is a singular production. In manner it is calm,
grave, almost philosophical; there is not the slightest effort at (p. 103)
fine writing; the tone can never be said to be even fervid. Yet it
must be confessed that not in the most exalted of Fourth of July
orations does the national eagle scream with a shriller note, or wing
his way with a more unflagging flight. Any one who formed his notions of
this country exclusively from this book, would be sure to fancy that
here at last paradise was reopening to the children of a fallen race.
After this remark, it may seem ridiculous, and yet it is perfectly just
to say, that Cooper, so far from giving way to exaggeration in his
assertions, kept himself well within the bounds of the truth. In the
exercise of that duty which presses heavily upon every reviewer, to
seem, if not to be wiser than his author, many of the English
periodicals, even those most favorable to America, undertook to doubt
his statements of fact, to sneer at his prophecies of the future as
ludicrous exaggerations, and to term them striking and whimsical
instances of Yankee braggadocio, and of the love of building castles in
the air. Cooper could not well overstate the material prosperity and
progress of the country, nor the inability of men trained under
different conditions either to believe it or to comprehend it. Reality
soon outran some of his most daring anticipations. His most extravagant
statements were speedily more than confirmed by the operation of
agencies whose mighty results he could not foresee, because, when he
wrote, the agencies themselves did not exist. He had carefully guarded
himself in one instance, by saying that he did not expect that the
Northwest would be settled within an early period. The precaution was
unnecessary. He had been brought up in a town, founded in the
wilderness, at a distance of less than one hundred and fifty miles (p. 104)
from the commercial capital of the republic. He lived long enough to see
the frontiers of civilization pushed one thousand miles west of the line
it had held in his boyhood's home.

Any wrong impression, therefore, which the work conveyed was not due to
the spirit of braggadocio pervading it, as asserted and commented upon
by the English reviewers. No false statement was made intentionally;
there were very few that