love of adventure, or the outlawry of crime had driven to
the wilderness--the solitary trapper, the reckless young frontiersman,
the officers and men of out-post garrisons. Whether Cooper's Indian
was the real being, or an idealized and rather melodramatic version of
the truth, has been a subject of dispute. However this be, he has
taken his place in the domain of art, and it is safe to say that his
standing there is secure. No boy will ever give him up.

Equally good with the _Leatherstocking_ novels, and equally national,
were Cooper's tales of the sea, or at least the best two of them--the
_Pilot_, 1833, founded upon the daring exploits of John Paul Jones, and
the _Red Rover_, 1828. But here, though Cooper still holds the sea, he
has had to admit competitors; and Britannia, who rules the waves in
song, has put in some claim to a share in the domain of nautical
fiction in the persons of Mr. W. Clark Russell and others. Though
Cooper's novels do not meet the deeper needs of the heart and the
imagination, their appeal to the universal love of a story is
perennial. We devour them when we are boys, and if we do not often
return to them when we are men, that is perhaps only because we have
read them before, and "know the ending." They are good yarns for the
forecastle and the camp-fire; and the scholar in his study, though he
may put the _Deerslayer_ or the _Last of the Mohicans_ away on the top
shelf, will take it down now and again, and sit up half the night over
it.

Before dismissing the _belles-lettres_ writings of this period, mention
should be made of a few poems of the fugitive kind which seem to have
taken a permanent place in popular regard. John Howard Payne, a native
of Long Island, a wandering actor and playwright, who died American
consul at Tunis in 1852, wrote about 1820 for Covent Garden Theater an
opera, entitled _Clari_, the libretto of which included the now famous
song of _Home, Sweet Home_. Its literary pretensions were of the
humblest kind, but it spoke a true word which touched the Anglo-Saxon
heart in its tenderest spot, and, being happily married to a plaintive
air, was sold by the hundred thousand, and is evidently destined to be
sung forever. A like success has attended the _Old Oaken Bucket_,
composed by Samuel Woodworth, a printer and journalist from
Massachusetts, whose other poems, of which two collections were issued
in 1818 and 1826, were soon forgotten. Richard Henry Wilde, a