Laudator Temporis Acti

James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers, chapter VIII:

Only one laborer in this temple of Minerva, however, was known to get so far as to attempt a translation of Virgil. He, indeed, appeared at the annual exhibition, to the prodigious exultation of all his relatives, a farmer's family in the vicinity, and repeated the whole of the first eclogue from memory, observing the intonations of the dialogue with much judgment and effect. The sounds, as they proceeded from his mouth, of

"Titty-ree too patty-lee ree-coo-bans sub teg-mi-nee faa-gy
Syl-ves-trem ten-oo-i moo-sam, med-i-taa-ris, aa-ve-ny."

were the last that had been heard in that building, as probably they were the first that had ever been heard, in the same language, there or anywhere else.

The original Latin, from the beginning of Virgil's first Eclogue, is:

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi
silvestrem tenui Musam meditaris avena.

In English:

Tityrus, reclining beneath the cover of a spreading beech tree, you practice a woodland melody on the slender pipe.

Virgil was not unknown elsewhere in the wilds of North America. See Edmund Gosse, Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments (1907), chapter VII:

One evening my Father took down his Virgil from an upper shelf, and his thoughts wandered away from surrounding things; he travelled in the past again. The book was a Delphin edition of 1798, which had followed him in all his wanderings; there was a great scratch on the sheep-skin cover that a thorn had made in a forest of Alabama. And then, in the twilight, as he shut the volume at last, oblivious of my presence, he began to murmur and to chant the adorable verses by memory.

Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi,

he warbled ; and I stopped my play, and listened as if to a nightingale, till he reached

                            tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra
Formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

Related post: Patulae Recubans Sub Tegmine Fagi.