PRECAUTION. A NOVEL. BY J. FENIMORE COOPER. "Be wise to-day, 'tis madness to defer- WITH A DISCOURSE ON THE LIFE, GENIUS, AND WRITINGS OF BY WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 1892. KE 7507 HARVAR Entered, according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1861, by W. A. TOWNSEND AND COMPANY, In the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. It is now somewhat more than a year since the friends of JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, in this city, were planning to give a public dinner in his honor. It was intended as an expression both of the regard they bore him personally, and of the pride they took in the glory his writings had reflected on the American name. We thought of what we should say in his hearing; in what terms, worthy of him and of us, we should speak of the esteem in which we held him, and of the interest we felt in a fame which had already penetrated to the remotest nook of the earth inhabited by civilized man. 1 Delivered at Metropolitan Hall, New York, February 25, 1852, at a Public Memorial Meeting in honor of Mr. Cooper, the Hon. Daniel Webster presiding. To-day we assemble for a sadder purpose: to pay to the dead some part of the honors then intended for the living. We bring our offering, but he is not here who should receive it; in his stead are vacancy and silence; there is no eye to brighten at our words, and no voice to answer. "It is an empty office that we perform," said Virgil, in his melodious verses, when commemorating the virtues of the young Marcellus, and bidding flowers be strewn, with full hands, over his early grave. might apply the expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part ony. We can no longer do any thing for him who is departed, but we may do what will not be without fruit to those who remain. It is good to occupy our thoughts with the example of great talents in conjunction with great virtues. His genius has passed away with him; but we may learn, from the history of his life, to employ the faculties we possess with useful activity and noble aims; we may copy his magnanimous frankness, his disdain of every thing that wears the faintest semblance of deceit, his refusal to comply with current abuses, and the courage with which, on all occasions, he asserted what he deemed truth, and combated what he thought error. The circumstances of Cooper's early life were remarkably suited to confirm the natural hardihood and manliness of his character, and to call forth and exercise that extraordinary power of observation, which accumulated the materials afterward wielded and shaped by his ge nius. His father, while an inhabitant of Burlington, in New Jersey, on the pleasant banks of the Delaware, was the owner of large possessions on the borders of the Otsego Lake, in our own State, and here, in the newlycleared fields, he built in 1786, the first house in Coopers town. To this home, Cooper, who was born in Burlington, in the year 1789, was conveyed in his infancy; and here, as he informs us in his preface to the Pioneers, his first impressions of the external world were obtained. Here he passed his childhood, with the vast forest around him, stretching up the mountains that overlook the lake, and far beyond, in a region where the Indian yet roamed, and the white hunter, half Indian in his dress and mode of life, sought his game,—a region in which the bear and the wolf were yet hunted, and the panther, more formidable than either, lurked in the thickets, and tales of wanderings in the wilderness, and encounters with these fierce animals, beguiled the length of the winter nights. Of this place, Cooper, although early removed from it to pursue his studies, was an occasional resident throughout his life, and here his last years were wholly passed. At the age of thirteen he was sent to Yale College, where, notwithstanding his extreme youth-for, with the exception of the poet, Hillhouse, he was the youngest of his class, and Hillhouse was afterward withdrawn-his progress in his studies is said to have been honorable to his talents. He left the college, after a residence of three years, and became a midshipman in the United States navy. Six years he followed the sea, and there yet wanders, among those who are fond of literary anecdote, a story of the young sailor who, in the streets of one of the English ports, attracted the curiosity of the crowd, by explaining to his companions a Latin motto in some public place. That during this period he made himself master of the knowledge and the imagery which he afterward employed to so much advantage in his romances of the sea, the finest ever written, is a common |