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 as foolishness.
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