Page:Female Prose Writers of America.djvu/421

 

Author:Susan Fenimore Cooper is a native and resident of Cooperstown, New York, and a daughter of the great American novelist. Her only publication, “Rural Hours,” a splendid octavo issued by Putnam in 1850, gave her at once a high rank among our female authors. It is in the form of a journal, running through one entire year, and giving an account of the most notable sights and sounds of country life. Miss Cooper has an observant eye, and a happy faculty of making her descriptions interesting by selecting the right objects, instead of the too common method of extravagant embellishment. She never gets into ecstasies, and sees nothing which anybody else might not see who walked through the same fields after her. Her work accordingly contains an admirable portraiture of American out-door life, just as it is, with no colouring but that which every object necessarily receives in passing through a contemplative and cultivated mind. 

 one of these violets we found a handsome coloured spider, one of the kind that live on flowers and take their colour from them; but this was unusually large. Its body was of the size of a well-grown pea, and of a bright lemon colour; its legs were also yellow, and altogether it was one of the most showy-coloured spiders we have seen in a long time. Scarlet or red ones still larger, are found, however, near New York. But, in their gayest aspect, these creatures are repulsive. It gives one a chilling idea of the gloomy solitude of a prison, when we remember that spiders have actually been petted by men shut out from better  (379)