where an episode or
paragraph was finished after the glow had yielded to exhaustion.

Mr. Parkman's theme is one of adventure on the grandest scale, with
novel conditions and elements, and under the quickening of master
passions of a sort to give to incidents and achievements a most romantic
and soul-absorbing interest. Only incidentally, and then most slightly,
does he have to deal with state affairs, with court intrigues, or with
diplomatic complications. He has to follow men into regions and scenes
in which there is so much raw material, and so much of the originality
of human conditions and qualities, that no precedents are of avail, and
it is even doubtful whether there are principles that have authority to
guide or that may be safely recognized. Nor could he have treated his
grand theme with that amazing facility and skill, which, as his work
manifests them, will satisfy all his readers that the theme belongs to
him and he to it, had not his native tastes, his training, and his
actual experience brought him into a most intelligent sympathy with his
subject-matter. Without being an adventurer, in the modern sense of the
term, he has the spirit which filled the best old sense of the word. He
has been a wide traveller and an explorer. Familiar by actual
observation with the scenes through which he has to follow the track of
the pioneers whom he chronicles, he has also acquainted himself by
foot-journeys and canoe-navigation under Indian guides with scenes and
regions still unspoiled of their wilderness features. He has crossed the
Rocky Mountains by the war-path of the savages, and penetrated far
beyond the borders of civilization in the direction of the northern ice
on our continent. He is skilled in native woodcraft, in the phenomena of
the forest and the lake, the winding river and the cataract. He has
watched the aspects of Nature through all the seasons in regions far
away from the havoc and the finish of culture. He has been alone as a
white man in the squalid lodges of the Indians, has lived after their
manner up to the edge of the restraints which a civilized man must
always take with him, and has consented to forego all that is meant by
the word comfort, that he might learn actually what our
transcendentalists and sentimentalists are so taken with theoretically.
He knows the inner make and furnishings of the savage brain and heart,
the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
follies, an