COOPER 



t 



child of nature. Later he became less demon- 

 strative, save when he was angry. In the last 

 twenty years of his life he not infrequently 

 lost his temper, though he would not utterly 

 forget what he was saying; and, however heated 

 the discussion might become, he never ceased 

 to be a gentleman. Neither indecency nor 

 aught approaching thereto ever issued from 

 his lips. As a youth in Switzerland, during 

 his life as a student, and even when he was a 

 teacher at Neuchatel, he was fond of singing, 

 and he liked to yodel after the fashion of the 

 Swiss and Tyrolese mountaineers, but he gave 

 this up when he came to America. 



Here his recreations were mostly social. 

 He was the friend of Longfellow, Lowell, and 

 Whittier; he was the friend of laborers and 

 fishermen. In society he liked to encounter 

 men of wealth and influence, for he had by 

 nature, and also learned from Alexander von 

 Humboldt, some of the arts of the courtier. 

 'It would be difficult,' says Dr. Charles D. 

 Walcott, 1 'to measure his influence in the way 

 of causing men of political and commercial 



1 Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 50. 217 (1908). 



[56] 



