James Russell Lowell

“ We follow the casualties of battle with the intense interest of one who has friends or acquaintance there. Mr. Parkman’s familiarity also with the scenery of his narratives is so intimate, his memory of the eye is so vivid, as almost to persuade us that ourselves have seen what he describes. ”

“ It is rare, indeed, to find, as they are found in him, a passion for the picturesque and a native predilection for rapidity and dash of movement in helpful society with patience in drudgery and a scrupulous deference to the rights of facts, however disconcerting, as at least sleeping-partners in the business of history. ”

“ We forget ourselves to swim in the canoe down rivers that flow out of one primeval silence to lose themselves in another, or to thread those expectant solitudes of forest (insuetum nemus) that seem listening with stayed breath for the inevitable ax, and then launch our birchen eggshells again on lakes that stretch beyond vision into the fairyland of conjecture. ”

“ Nature had not yet refused her sympathy to men of heroic breed, and earth still shuddered, sun and moon still veiled their faces at the right tragical crisis. The historian could then draw on the accumulated fancy of mankind in the legend, or on the sympathy of old religion in the myth. ”

“ Parkman never loses sight of those links of cause and effect, whether to be sought in political theory, religious belief, or mortal incompleteness, which give to the story of Man a moral, and reduce the fortuitous to the narrow limits where it properly belongs. ”

“ The world into which we are led touches the imagination with pathetic interest. It is mainly a world of silence and of expectation, awaiting the masters who are to subdue it and to fill it with the tumult of human life, and of almost more than human energy. ”

“ It is worth mentioning that a son of this clergyman, at the age of seventeen, served as private in a Massachusetts regiment during that old French war, as it used to be called, to which his grandnephew has given a deeper meaning, and which he has made alive to us again in all its vivid picturesqueness of hardihood and adventure. ”