INFLUENCE OF NORTH AMERICAN LITERATURE 497 



many isolated globes of granite, like white skulls rising from the 

 ground, laid bare, washed and worn by the rain." Does not this 

 sound as if taken from an Indian romance? 



Whether Stifter read also Cooper's sea-stories is a question that 

 is not answered. Slight reminiscences of them may be indicated 

 since Stifter was unacquainted with the sea and quite unlikely of 

 himself to think of figures drawn from naval warfare by his com- 

 paring the scene of his narrative to a secluded bay of the sea, and 

 by his speaking of "island summits of a submerged melody," or of 

 a "squadron of thoughts." 



In summary, we can say: A German writer of inborn poetic 

 gifts, genuinely rooted in his native soil, was intoxicated, in his early 

 years, by exotic stories of adventure, which had been borne across 

 the sea from far North America, and which were then among the 

 most widely read of entertaining literature. His religious and artistic 

 development then took a direction quite independent of the foreign 

 author, but similar to his. When in riper years the spring of literary 

 production suddenly broke forth in him, new works of the old friend 

 were the means of furthering and accelerating the creative process 

 and giving it a definite direction. The invention of a plot was, all his 

 life, Stifter's weakest point; but to his aid comes an author who is 

 one of the richest in matter in the world's literature. The represent- 

 ation of a foreign landscape, not unlike that of his home, awoke in 

 him the slumbering remembrance of the impressions of his childhood, 

 and helped him to discover the most precious side of his talent, that 

 of painting nature in words, which he had previously done only in 

 colors. Through Cooper's influence, a mediocre painter becomes an 

 eminent writer. The foreign divining-rod conjures ever new treasures 

 from his native endowment. The literary stimulus unites with his 

 close acquaintance with his own land and with the painful experiences 

 of his own heart. What was foreign and what was individual fused 

 most intimately to form a fresh and worthy literary work, which 

 seemed to spring, as if from a fountain, out of the innermost being of 

 its creator, and which has always counted as his most original 

 production: a noteworthy example of the close and fruitful contact 

 of two authors, two literatures, two hemispheres. 



