Here was our new Adam of the wilderness, forced to
name anew, not the visible creation of God, but the invisible creation of
man, in those forms that lie at the base of social institutions, so
insensibly moulding personal character and controlling individual action.
Here is the protagonist of our New World epic, a figure as poetic as that
of Achilles, as ideally representative as that of Don Quixote, as
romantic in its relation to our homespun and plebeian mythus as Arthur in
his to the mailed and plumed cycle of chivalry. We do not mean, of
course, that Cooper's "Leatherstocking" is all this or anything like it,
but that the character typified in him is ideally and potentially all
this and more.
But whatever was poetical in the lives of the early New-Englanders had
something shy, if not sombre, about it. If their natures flowered, it was
out of sight, like the fern. It was in the practical that they showed
their true quality, as Englishmen are wont. It has been the fashion
lately with a few feeble-minded persons to undervalue the New England
Puritans, as if they were nothing more than gloomy and narrow-minded
fanatics. But all the charges brought against these large-minded and
far-seeing men are precisely those which a really able fanatic, Joseph de
Maistre, lays at the door of Protestantism.
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