Page:Essays in Historical Criticism.djvu/299

Rh Mexico and Conquest of Peru the opportunity to reconcile indulgence in his profound love of wild nature with the most conscientious effort to give an adequate historical setting to the drama of the forest, with which the novelist had delighted both hemispheres.

For the details of Parkman's life the reader must be referred to the recent biography by a friend of his later years, Mr. Charles H. Farnham, which contains his autobiography and considerable extracts from his diaries and letters and from such of his minor writings as throw light on his life and opinions; to the admirable Memoir of his college classmate and lifelong friend Mr. Edward Wheelwright, in the first volume of the Proceedings of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts; and for a revelation of his character to Parkman's novel, Vassal Morton.

He was born in Boston of parents of New England ancestry, September 16, 1823. His father, the Rev. Francis Parkraan, was for many years a prominent Unitarian clergyman. The boyhood of the historian revealed the dominant tastes of his later life. He was studious at school and especially interested in poetry and in acquiring a varied command over his mother tongue, but his vacations he devoted to the woods and to woodland sports. As early as his sophomore year in college, where he was a member of the Harvard class of 1844, he had chosen history as his life work, and, designing to combine the pursuit of literature with the gratification of his love of Nature, he selected as his particular subject "'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."