Yeah, it woulda been better if I’d thought that one through.
Thank you for the recommendation. I have bookmarked this page
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/21816/21816-h/21816-h.htm
and I’ll be reading it.
I’ve read some Irving and Emerson, no Hawthorne. I like both better than Cooper. Overall the writing was better IMHO.
ROFL. 
Just thinking about this more.
Are Emerson and Irving really comparable to Cooper? I think of the first two in terms of short stories and poems and Cooper as a novelist.
Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” is still a good reading and a page turner. The characters were far more interesting the cardboard constructions of Cooper.
Emerson wrote some very good essays. Stilted by today’s standards, but not dreadfully boring like Cooper.
I am not a huge fan of poetry, but Emerson’s are often like a song.
Here is a public domain example that I always have liked.
THE SPHINX
The Sphinx is drowsy,
Her wings are furled:
Her ear is heavy,
She broods on the world.
"Who’ll tell me my secret,
The ages have kept?–
I awaited the seer
While they slumbered and slept:–
"The fate of the man-child,
The meaning of man;
Known fruit of the unknown;
Daedalian plan;
Out of sleeping a waking,
Out of waking a sleep;
Life death overtaking;
Deep underneath deep?
"Erect as a sunbeam,
Upspringeth the palm;
The elephant browses,
Undaunted and calm;
In beautiful motion
The thrush plies his wings;
Kind leaves of his covert,
Your silence he sings.
"The waves, unashamèd,
In difference sweet,
Play glad with the breezes,
Old playfellows meet;
The journeying atoms,
Primordial wholes,
Firmly draw, firmly drive,
By their animate poles.
"Sea, earth, air, sound, silence.
Plant, quadruped, bird,
By one music enchanted,
One deity stirred,–
Each the other adorning,
Accompany still;
Night veileth the morning,
The vapor the hill.
"The babe by its mother
Lies bathèd in joy;
Glide its hours uncounted,–
The sun is its toy;
Shines the peace of all being,
Without cloud, in its eyes;
And the sum of the world
In soft miniature lies.
"But man crouches and blushes,
Absconds and conceals;
He creepeth and peepeth,
He palters and steals;
Infirm, melancholy,
Jealous glancing around,
An oaf, an accomplice,
He poisons the ground.
“Out spoke the great mother,
Beholding his fear;–
At the sound of her accents
Cold shuddered the sphere:–
‘Who has drugged my boy’s cup?
Who has mixed my boy’s bread?
Who, with sadness and madness,
Has turned my child’s head?’”
I heard a poet answer
Aloud and cheerfully,
'Say on, sweet Sphinx! thy dirges
Are pleasant songs to me.
Deep love lieth under
These pictures of time;
They fade in the light of
Their meaning sublime.
"The fiend that man harries
Is love of the Best;
Yawns the pit of the Dragon,
Lit by rays from the Blest.
The Lethe of Nature
Can’t trance him again,
Whose soul sees the perfect,
Which his eyes seek in vain.
"To vision profounder,
Man’s spirit must dive;
His aye-rolling orb
At no goal will arrive;
The heavens that now draw him
With sweetness untold,
Once found,–for new heavens
He spurneth the old.
"Pride ruined the angels,
Their shame them restores;
Lurks the joy that is sweetest
In stings of remorse.
Have I a lover
Who is noble and free?–
I would he were nobler
Than to love me.
"Eterne alternation
Now follows, now flies;
And under pain, pleasure,–
Under pleasure, pain lies.
Love works at the centre,
Heart-heaving alway;
Forth speed the strong pulses
To the borders of day.
“Dull Sphinx, Jove keep thy five wits;
Thy sight is growing blear;
Rue, myrrh and cummin for the Sphinx,
Her muddy eyes to clear!”
The old Sphinx bit her thick lip,–
Said, "Who taught thee me to name?
I am thy spirit, yoke-fellow;
Of thine eye I am eyebeam.
“Thou art the unanswered question;
Couldst see thy proper eye,
Alway it asketh, asketh;
And each answer is a lie.
So take thy quest through nature,
It through thousand natures ply;
Ask on, thou clothed eternity;
Time is the false reply.”
Uprose the merry Sphinx,
And crouched no more in stone;
She melted into purple cloud,
She silvered in the moon;
She spired into a yellow flame;
She flowered in blossoms red;
She flowed into a foaming wave:
She stood Monadnoc’s head.
Thorough a thousand voices
Spoke the universal dame;
“Who telleth one of my meanings
Is master of all I am.”
I would like to hear Rick Wakeman put this to music.
I just finished it last week. What torture. Every night I had to force myself to read a chapter before moving to a book I wanted to read.
I have not read any of his other books but this was in my classics stack so I felt obligated to keep reading as I thought I was perhaps missing out on something. I’m also one of those stubborn people who cannot just give up on a book.
I look forward to reading the Mark Twain article.
Ok, now I feel like a freak. When I first read The Deerslayer, Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, I was absolutely in love with character of Natty Bumppo. Yeah, even I acknowledge that he has a stupid name. Let’s just call him “Hawkeye.” I deliberately didn’t read the last book or two because I didn’t want to read about him getting old.
I do confess that The Last of the Mohicans is the only one I’ve re-read (several times, most recently just last year), but I keep meaning to go back and read the others again. Heck, the first recording I did for Librivox was a chapter of LotM.
You do have to be able to put your head into that 19th century place, where language is slow and somewhat ponderous, and they’re not afraid of throwing in 2 or 3 paragraphs of French right in the middle of the story or something. But I kinda like all that.
I know, I’m weird. I can live with it. 
I don’t think you’re weird. I haven’t re-read the book, but it’s more because I felt I had outgrown it (this from someone who bought the last Harry Potter book on the day it was released and who has since reread the whole saga) then because I didn’t like it in the first place.
And the Mark Twain essay has since tainted my memory of the book.
Ya know, that’s why I haven’t read that essay. I’m sure it’s great, but I LIKE Fenimore Cooper. :dubious:
Well, OK, one other good thing about Cooper: the best entry in the category of “Is it the name of an American literary character, or a Japanese food?”
I read it when I was 12 or 13. I don’t remember the details, but I think my father made me read it one summer since I was reading too much SF, and he wanted me to read something more literary. Horrible read and utterly forgettable, except when the British were leaving their fort under truce, and the Indian grabbed the baby and smashed its head on a rock. That stayed with me.