IT is mere coincidence that Cooper was born in the year which produced The Power of Sympathy and that when he died Uncle Toms Cabin was passing through its serial stage, and yet the limits of his life mark almost exactly the first great period of American fiction. – Carl Clinton Van Doren

The delicate and infirm go for sympathy, not to the well and buoyant, but to those who have suffered like themselves. – Catharine Esther Beecher