well day during his entire literary career." Even
when aided by secretaries and copyists, six lines a day was often the
limit of his production. His own Stoic words about the limitations of
his eyesight are characteristic: "By reading for one minute, and then
resting for an equal time, this alternate process may gradually be
continued for about half an hour. Then, after a sufficient interval, it
may be repeated, often three or four times in the course of the day.
By this means nearly the whole of the volume now offered has been
composed." There is no more piteous or inspiring story of a fight
against odds in the history of literature.

For after his fortieth year the enemy gave way a little, and book after
book somehow got itself written. There they stand upon the shelves, a
dozen of them--"The Pioneers of France," "The Jesuits in North America,"
"La Salle," "The Old Regime," "Frontenac," "Montcalm and Wolfe," "A
Half-Century of Conflict"--the boy's dream realized, the man's long
warfare accomplished. The history of the forest, as Parkman saw it,
was a pageant with the dark wilderness for a background, and, for the
actors, taciturn savages, black-robed Jesuits, intrepid explorers,
soldiers of France--all struggling for a vast prize, all changing,
passing, with a pomp and color unknown to wearied Europe. It was a
superb theme, better after all for an American than the themes chosen by
Prescott and Ticknor and Motley, and precisely adapted to the pictorial
and narrative powers of the soldier-minded, soldier-hearted author.

The quality which Parkman admired most in men--though he never seems to
have loved men deeply, even his own heroes--was strength of will. That
was the secret of his own power, and the sign, it must be added, of the
limitations of this group of historians who came at the close of the
golden age. Whatever a New England will can accomplish was wrought
manfully by such admirable men as Prescott and Parkman. Trained
intelligence, deliberate selection of subject, skillful cultivation of
appropriate story-telling and picture-painting style, all these were
theirs. But the "wild ecstasy" that thrilled the young Emerson as he
crossed the bare Common at sunset, the "supernal beauty" of which Poe
dreamed in the Fordham cottage, the bay horse and hound and turtle-dove
which Thoreau lost long ago and could not find in his but at Walden,
these were something which our later Greeks of the New England Athens
esteemed