Our first novelist who sought a paradise of American nature was James Fenimore Cooper. Revolting against both the feudalism of aristocratic Europe and the crude democracy of Jacksonian America, Cooper sought refuge in projecting his ideals in the character of Leatherstocking and also in such a Utopian paradise as in _The Crater_. Whatever one may think of Cooper’s Indians, his “females,” his woodcraft, or his rhetoric, Leatherstocking remains a great contribution to the fiction of the world, “perhaps,” according to Professor Paine, “the greatest embodiment of native character in American literature.” He is strangely compounded of Cooper’s memories of his old hunter-friend Shipman, of the heroic saga of the early frontiersman as synthesised in Daniel Boone, of the Rousseauistic-Wordsworthian myth of the natural man spiritualised by contact with forest and stream, and of the idealism of American manhood. According to Cooper’s summary, “... His feelings appeared to possess the freshness and nature of the forest in which he passed so much of his time, and no casuist could have made clearer decisions in matters relating to right and wrong.... In short ... he was a fair example of what a just-minded and pure man might be, while untempted by unruly or ambitious desires, and left to follow the bias of his feelings, amid the solitary grandeur and ennobling influences of a sublime nature.” In 1828, however, we find Cooper disillusioned: “All attempts to blend history and romance in America have been comparative failures.... The baldness of American life is in deadly hostility to scenic representation.” And in _The Crater_ (1847) we find him creating a Utopia in a fabulous mid-Pacific island in order to furnish a contrast to the wretchedness of contemporary American life. This is a story of how some folk, shipwrecked on a reef which is the crater of a volcano, succeed in causing vegetation to grow, of how they create a “settlement surrounded with a sort of earthly paradise” which is finally “buried beneath the ocean.” The story, as Cooper conceives it, is a parable: “Of such is the world and its much-coveted advantages. For a time our efforts seem to create, and to adorn, and to perfect, until we forget our origin and destination, substituting self for that divine hand ...” Already, in _The Monikins_ (1835), born of bitter disenchantment, Cooper the former idealist had presented the world as a country ruled by a race of monkeys who laughed to scorn the Yahoo race of mankind. The hope of an American paradise of nature ended for Cooper in disillusionment; natural goodness, democracy, human ideals are revealed here as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. Professor Pattee compares Cooper’s final pessimism with that of Mark Twain: “Both began as border-minded individualists, parochial-minded, intoxicated with American idealism; both by travel and by wide contacts with urban pessimism were educated into blasé cosmopolitanism ... and both went