The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 96, October 1865: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
the qualities of their thought and passions, their superstitions,
follies, and vices; and while he deals with them and their ways with the
right spirit and consideration of a high-toned Christian man, he yields
to no silly inventiveness of fancy or romance in portraying them. They
are barely human, and they are hideous and revolting in his pages, as
they are in real life. Mr. Parkman knows them for just what they are,
and as they are. Helped by natural adaptation and sympathy to put
himself into communication with them sufficiently to analyze their
composition and to scan their range of being, he has presented such a
portraiture and estimate of them as will be increasingly valuable while
they are wasting away, to be known to future generations only by the
record.
It is through Mr. Parkman's keen observation and discernment, as a
traverser of wild regions and a student of aboriginal life and
character, that his pages are made to abound with such vivid and
vigorous delineations. He has great skill in description, whether on a
grand scale or in the minutest details of adventure or of scenery. He
can touch by a phrase, most delicately or massively, the outline and the
features of what he would communicate. He can strip from field,
river-bank, hill-top, and the partially cleared forests all the things
and aspects which civilization has superinduced, and can restore to them
their primitive, unsullied elements. He gives us the aroma of the wild
woods, the tints of tree, shrub, and berry as the autumn paints them,
the notes and screams and howls of the creatures which held these haunts
before or with man; and though we were reading some of his pages on one
of the hottest of our dog-days, we felt a grateful chill come over us as
we were following his description of a Canadian winter.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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