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Updated: May 22, 2025
They're really so picturesque; they trail clouds of Fenimore Cooper; and they seem, for all their unfitness, reposefully more in touch with permanent things than the America that has succeeded them. And it is interesting to watch our pathetic efforts to prevent or disarm the effects of ourselves. What will happen?
Other things being equal, the books that have lived the longest are those which have been executed with admirable art. The decline in the fame of Fenimore Cooper is a case in point.
In part it reads: "I, James Fenimore Cooper, give and bequeath to my wife, Susan Augusta, all my property, whether personal or mixed, to be enjoyed by her and her heirs forever. I make my said wife the executrix of my will." In a little over four months his wife followed him to the far country.
Then one afternoon came Sir Anthony Fenimore to see me, and with a view to obtaining either my advice or my sympathy, reopened the story of his daughter Althea found drowned in the canal eleven months before. What he considered a most disconcerting light had just been cast on the tragedy by Maria Beccles. This lady was Lady Fenimore's sister.
After greetings he raised his bunch of onions and said: "I have turned farmer, but am obliged to come to town now and then, as you see." Kind remembrances were sent to Greenough; and of Italy he added: "There is no place where mere living is such a luxury." Fenimore Cooper had a keen sense of the ridiculous. His table-talk by his own fireside was full of cheery life, fun, and glowing merriment.
Most methodical and correspondence-docketing of men, he went to his library and returned with a couple of letters. The old lady looked them through grimly. "Pretty vague. No details. Read 'em again, Anthony." When he had done so, she said: "Well?" Lady Fenimore objected: "But Althea did stay with you. She must have stayed with you." "All right, Edith," said Maria, sitting bolt upright.
A villager coming in at that time, the postmaster asked him if he knew who was visiting Mr. Cooper. 'Commodore Shubrick, was the reply. 'All, that's the name! said Pat; 'and sure, didn't I come near it, though!" Possibly the sailing of Sir John Franklin in 1845 for the frozen country of the North Star led Fenimore Cooper to write "The Sea Lions," in the winter of 1849.
On the 14th of last September, America lost the greatest of her novelists in the person of James Fenimore Cooper. He was born on the 15th of that month, 1789; so that, had he lived but a few hours longer, he would have completed his sixty-second year.
One of the earliest pioneers of science in geology and archaeology, Charles Whittlesey is identified with Cleveland, where the girlhood of the gifted novelist, Constance Fenimore Woolson, was passed. There, too, Charles F. Browne began to make his pseudonym of Artemus Ward known, and helped found the school of American humor.
And up to the date on which I begin this little Chronicle of Wellingsford, namely that of the summons to Wellings Park, when I heard of the death of young Oswald Fenimore, that is all I knew of the matter. Throughout July my friends were like dead people. There was nothing that could be said to them by way of consolation. The sun had gone out of their heaven. There was no light in the world.
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