It is not by such a process that a narrative is made vital and true. It does not do to lose the point of view of the first listener to the tale, or to rearrange the matter too much out of the order of nature. You must instruct your reader as the events themselves would have instructed him, had he been able to note them as they passed. The historian must not lose his own fresh view of the scene as it passed and changed more and more from year to year and from age to age. He must keep with the generation of which he writes, not be too quick to be wiser than they were or look back upon them in his narrative with head over shoulder. He must write of them always in the atmosphere they themselves breathed, not hastening to judge them, but striving only to realize them at every turn of the story, to make their thoughts his own, and call their lives back again, rebuilding the very stage upon which they played their parts. Bring the end of your story to mind while you set about telling its beginning, and it seems to have no parts: beginning, middle, end, are all as one,--are merely like parts of a pattern which you see as a single thing stamped upon the stuff under your hand. Try the method with the history of our own land and people. How will you begin? Will you start with a modern map and a careful topographical description of the continent? And then, having made your nineteenth-century framework for the narrative, will you ask your reader to turn back and see the seventeenth century, and those lonely ships coming in at the capes of the Chesapeake? He will never see them so long as you compel him to stand here at the end of the nineteenth century and look at them as if through a long retrospect. The attention both of the narrator and of the reader, if history is to be seen aright, must look forward, not backward. It must see with a contemporaneous eye. Let the historian, if he be wise, know no more of the history as he writes than might have been known in the age and day of which he is writing. A trifle too much knowledge will undo him. It will break the spell for his imagination. It will spoil the magic by which he may raise again the image of days that are gone. He must of course know the large lines of his story; it must lie as a whole in his mind. His very art demands that, in order that he may know and keep its proportions. But the details, the passing incidents of day and year, must come fresh into his mind, unreasoned upon as yet, untouched by theory, with their first look upon them. It is here that original documents and fresh research will serve him. He must look far and wide upon every detail of the time, see it at first hand, and paint as he looks; selecting, as the artist must, but selecting while the vision is fresh, and not from old sketches laid away in his notes,--selecting from the life itself.