The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Deerslayer, by James Fenimore Cooper

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Title: The Deerslayer

Author: James Fenimore Cooper

Posting Date: January 26, 2009 [EBook #3285]
Release Date: June, 2002

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Stephen Kerr and Martin Robb

THE DEERSLAYER

By James Fenimore Cooper

Chapter I.

"There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore.
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From all I may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express, yet cannot all conceal"

Childe Harold.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus, he
who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived
long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest
assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the
venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the
mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems
remote and obscure, the thousand changes that thicken along the links
of recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to a day so
distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of
ordinary duration would suffice to transmit, from mouth to mouth, in the
form of tradition, all that civilized man has achieved within the
limits of the republic. Although New York alone possesses a population
materially exceeding that of either of the four smallest kingdoms of
Europe, or materially exceeding that of the entire Swiss Confederation,
it is little more than two centuries since the Dutch commenced their
settlement, rescuing the region from the savage state. Thus, what seems
venerable by an accumulation of changes is reduced to familiarity when
we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time.

This glance into the perspective of the past will prepare the