b who was
bored with literary talk and literary people; a staunch American who
despised democracy as thoroughly as Alexander Hamilton, and thought
suffrage a failure; a nineteenth century historian who cared nothing
for philosophy, science, or the larger lessons of history itself; a
fascinating realistic writer who admired Scott, Byron, and Cooper for
their tales of action, and despised Wordsworth and Thoreau as effeminate
sentimentalists who were preoccupied with themselves. In Parkman "the
wheel has come full circle," and a movement that began with expansion of
self ended in hard Spartan repression, even in inhibition of emotion.

Becoming "enamoured of the woods" at sixteen, Parkman chose his life
work at eighteen, and he was a man who could say proudly: "I have not
yet abandoned any plan which I ever formed." "Before the end of the
sophomore year," he wrote in his autobiography, "my various schemes had
crystallized into a plan of writing the story of what was then known
as the 'Old French War,' that is, the war that ended in the conquest of
Canada, for here, as it seemed to me, the forest drama was more stirring
and the forest stage more thronged with appropriate actors than in any
other passage of our history. It was not till some years later that I
enlarged the plan to include the whole course of the American conflict
between France and England, or, in other words, the history of the
American forest: for this was the light in which I regarded it. My theme
fascinated me, and I was haunted with wilderness images day and night."
To understand "the history of the American forest" young Parkman devoted
his college vacations to long trips in the wilderness, and in 1846, two
years after graduation, he made the epoch-making journey described in
his first book, "The Oregon Trail."

"The Conspiracy of Pontiac," a highly-colored narrative in two volumes
appearing in 1851, marks the first stage of his historical writing. Then
came the tragedy of shattered health, and for fourteen years Parkman
fought for life and sanity, and produced practically nothing. He had had
to struggle from his college days with an obscure disorder of the
brain, aggravated by the hardships of his Oregon Trail journey, and by
ill-considered efforts to harden his bodily frame by over-exertion.
His disease took many forms--insomnia, arthritis, weakness of sight,
incapacity for sustained thought. His biographer Farnham says that "he
never saw a perfectly