INFLUENCE OF NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE 495 



itself and reaches out with its long arms into the air, the bushes, 

 berries, and vines are pushed, like children, to the sides and into the 

 corners, so that there may be room in the middle for the guests. 

 Cooper likens some young trees, with few branches, to grenadiers 

 standing as sentinels; and Stifter, in the Heath Village, still more 

 drastically compares the locusts to Haiducks, in pale green uniform. 

 Everywhere in Cooper we meet dead or dying trees. Keep good hold 

 of your arms, so reads a passage in the Pathfinder, but lie as 

 still as the corpses of dead trees. In the Mountain Forest, "here and 

 there lies the skeleton of a fallen tree/' or one sees along the further 

 shore of the lake, "the old, whitened trunks lying in horrible con- 

 fusion," or "fringing the dark water with a melancholy, white 

 abattis." And once more Stifter simplifies in a way that gives greater 

 strength and effect, when he remodels Cooper's "disabled trunks, 

 niarking the earth like headstones in a graveyard," into the plastic 

 "tree-graveyard." The thought of gravestones is suggested also to 

 Sealsfield's mind by the stumps left where wood has been cut. 

 Stifter, however, is conscious of the difference between his landscape 

 and the tropical landscape of Sealsfield, when he says in a compari- 

 son: "Grandly beautiful as a youthful heart, resting in the fullness 

 of poetry and imagination, growing luxuriantly, resplendent as the 

 tropical wilderness, but also as unconscious, as uncultivated, as 

 rough, and as exotic as it." 



If, in accordance with the preceding, we admit the marked de- 

 pendence of Stifter on Cooper in the conduct of the action, in the 

 characterization of the persons, in the description of the landscapes, 

 and in many other points, we may also find a parallel between the 

 two writers in many details, in which, however, the younger would 

 have 1 had no nerd of another's; suggestion. For example, the import- 

 ant, episode of the hawk is quite exactly prefigured in Cooper; and 

 the similarity of the descriptions is the more striking, because the 

 conversations connected therewith contain related motives. 



.Many figures and turns of expression, also, that are common to 

 the two writers, cannot be ascribed to mere accident. Stifter's 

 'imagination attuned to witchery" ("Zauberphantasie ") recalls 

 the "witchery" which the Indians spy everywhere. As "witchery" 

 appeal's in the Mountain Forest, so Cooper's other favorite word 

 "magic" comes to light in the Ilt-atfi Yili<'<j<\ Cooper and Sealsfield 

 put everything in a pictorial or picturesque way. and often use com- 

 parisons drawn from painting; Stifter would naturally have been 

 led to the same thing by his talent for painting and his occupation 

 with it. The plastic arts lay further from his bent and knowledge, 

 and when, therefore, he compares (ireu'ory to a statue, and the two 

 sisters to two faultless statues of marble, we are reminded of the 

 countless similar comparisons in Cooper: " like a dark, proud statue "; 



