What is an example of a symbol and an image in James Fenimore Cooper's The Pathfinder?

An important symbol is set up by Cooper at the beginning of
Chapter 1 of The Pathfinder. The mystique surrounding Natty Bumpo because of
his "great purity of character, and ... marked peculiarities" depends upon the expansiveness of
his presence, which is what allows him have singular focus on his responsibilities for people's
safety in the frontier. This sense of expansiveness and singularity is symbolically established
in the first lines that speak of the sublime vast void:

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The sublimity connected with vastness is familiar to
every eye. The most abstruse, the most far-reaching, perhaps the most chastened of the poet's
thoughts, crowd on the imagination as he gazes into the depths of the illimitable
void.

In this symbol also rests the
thing that once lost causes Natty to act contrary to his nature, to endanger people's lives, and
to cause Dunham the loss of his life. This other element of the symbol is the isolation from
human emotion and intimacy that must accompany Natty's expansiveness and singularity. When he
falls in love with Mabel, he steps out of the isolation, which proves to be costly for those for
whom he is responsible. Natty feels his failure and regrets the distraction of love and the ill
consequences that resulted. Afterward, Natty reclaims his position in a vast expanse of a void
and in so doing also reclaims his place as “the most renowned hunter of that portion of the
state.”

The same quote serves to illustrate an image Cooper
conjures up, that of illimitable vastness, but another equally descriptive image is offered in
the first chapter--an image therefore central to the mood (or atmosphere) Cooper wants to
establish for the novel. The scene is the encounter with trees piled upon each other so high as
to "ascend to an elevation of some thirty feet above the level of the earth." Cooper's narrator
creates an image of these trees by describing their "vast trunks" as "broken and driven by the
force of a gust" of wind and as "interlaced" and having "their branches still exhaling the
fragrance of withering leaves."