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Precaution.

A Novel.

By J. Fenimore Cooper.

"Be wise to-day. It is madness to defer; To-morrow's caution may arrive
too late."

W. C. Bryant's Discourse on the Life, Genius, and Writings of James
Fenimore Cooper, Delivered at Metropolitan Hall, N.Y., February 25,
1852.

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 to 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.

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. We might apply
the expression to the present occasion, but it would be true in part
only. We can no longer do anything 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 everything 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 afterwards wielded and shaped by his genius.
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 newly-
cleared fields, he built, in 1786, the first house in Cooperstown. 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
afterwards 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 afterwards employed to so much advantage in his
romances of the sea, the finest ever written, is a common and obvious
remark; but it has not been so far as I know, observed that from the
discipline of a seaman's life he may have derived much of his readiness
and