Yet, though his latter days were spent in the country, the life (p. 118) he led henceforward deserves anything but the name of a pastoral. With the return from Europe begins the epic period of Cooper's career. The next ten years, in particular, were years of battle and storm. He had been criticised harshly and unjustly; he came back prepared and disposed to criticise. His feelings found expression at once. The America to which he had returned seemed to him much worse than that from which he had gone. In his opinion nearly everything had deteriorated. Manners, morals, the whole spirit of the nation, struck him as being on a lower level. Yet the change was not really in the people; it was in himself. The country had been moving on in the line of its natural bustling development; he, on the contrary, had been going back in sentiment. In one particular there was a certain justification for the dislike expressed by him for the novel things he saw. The business of the entire land was in a feverish condition. The Erie Canal, completed the year before his departure for Europe, had opened an unbroken water way from the Atlantic sea-board to the farthest shores of the great lakes. To this stimulus to population and trade was added the expected stimulus of the railroad system, then in its infancy. Both together were disclosing, though more to the imagination than to the eye, the wealth that lay hid in the unsettled regions of the West. They were active agents, therefore, in creating one of those periods of speculative prosperity which are sure to recur when any new and unforeseen avenue to sudden fortune is laid open. The immense field for endeavor revealed by the prospective establishment of flourishing communities reacted unfavorably upon the intellectual movement which had begun in a feeble way (p. 119) to show itself twenty years before. The attraction of mighty enterprises which held out to the hope promises of the highest temporal triumphs, was a competition that mere literary and scholastic pursuits, with their doubtful success and precarious rewards, could not well maintain. The country certainly went back for a time in higher things in consequence of that rapid material progress which drew to its further development the youthful energy and ability of the entire land. To make money and to make it rapidly seemed to be the one object of life.