James Fenimore Cooper

The Pathfinder James Fenimore Cooper

The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable void. The expanse of the ocean is seldom seen by the novice with indifference; and the mind, even in the obscurity of night, finds a parallel to that grandeur, which seems inseparable from images that the senses cannot compass. With feelings akin to this admiration and awe-the offspring of sublimity-were the different characters with which the action of this tale must open, gazing on the scene before them. Four persons in all, -two of each sex, -they had managed to ascend a pile of trees, that had been uptorn by a tempest, to catch a view of the objects that surrounded the