On the 17th of May, 1827, "The Prairie" was published. It did not meet with the extraordinary success of "The Last of the Mohicans," nor has it ever been as great a favorite with the general public. It was written in a far more quiet and subdued vein. It never keeps up that prolonged strain upon the feelings which characterizes the work that preceded it, and which while a defect in the eyes of some is to most readers its special charm. There are, indeed, in many of Cooper's stories, situations more thrilling and scenes more stirring than can be found in "The Prairie," though in it there is no lack of these. But of all his tales it is much the most poetical. Man sinks into insignificance in the presence of these mighty solitudes; for throughout the whole book the immensity of nature hangs over the spirit like a pall. Nor were the characters of the principal personages out of harmony with the atmosphere that envelopes the scenes described. In the lonely hunter, now (p. 073) nearing his grave, there is a pathetic grandeur, which is a natural development, and not an artificial addition. Though he has hurried as far away as possible from the din of the settlements, he is no longer querulous and irritable as in his old age in the Otsego hills. He has learned to recognize the inevitable. While he does not cease to regret, he has ceased to denounce. He knows that the majestic solitude of nature will not long remain undisturbed, nor its more majestic silence unbroken; for in every wind that blows from the East he hears the sound of axes and the crash of falling trees that herald the march of civilization across the continent. He sorrows at the ruin impending on all that is dearest to his heart; but he awaits it in dignified submission. In fine contrast to him stands the man who has likewise sought the solitude of the wilderness, not because he loves the beauty and the majesty of primeval nature, but because he hates the restraints that human society has thrown about the indulgence of human passions. Criticism has rarely done justice to the skill and power with which Cooper has drawn the squatter of the prairies, who holds that land should be as free as air; who has traveled hundreds of miles beyond the Mississippi to reach a place where title-deeds are not registered and sheriffs make no levies; who neither fears God nor regards man; to whom the rule of the rifle is the supremest law; and yet who, with all his detestation of the safeguards which society has erected for its security, has a moral code and a rough wild justice of his own.