I have made this rather extensive summary of the singular autobiography-- and largely in the author's own words--not to prepare your minds for lenient judgments of his work, but to inform them of the tenacious purpose of the man whose infirmities of the knees kept him most of his life from the wild forest trails and streams and compelled him to a wheel-chair in gardens of tame roses; whose weakness of the eyes allowed him but inadequate vision of the splendor of the woods and even robbed him of the intimacy of books; whose malady of mind kept him ever in terror of devils more fierce than the inhuman tortures of Jogues and Brébeuf--a tenacious purpose that wrought its youth-selected, self-appointed work, and so well, so splendidly, so thoroughly that it needs never to be done again. One of his friends, in a memoir of Parkman, recalls an observation of Sainte-Beuve, in his paper on Taine's "English Literature," that has found its best illustration in what Parkman accomplished in spite of lameness, blindness, and mental distress: "All things considered, every allowance being made for general or particular elements and for circumstances, there still remain place and space enough around men of talent, wherein they can move and turn themselves with entire freedom. And, moreover, were the circle drawn round each a very contracted one, every man of talent, every genius, in so far as he is in some degree a magician and an enchanter, possesses a secret entirely his own, whereby to perform prodigies within this circle and work wonders there." [Footnote: "Nouveaux Lundis," vol. VIII, English translation in "English Portraits," p. 243.] This autobiography has shown how short was the radius of the circle. The twelve volumes of his work attest, under Sainte-Beuve's definition, the degree of his powers of magic and enchantment. Men of strong knees, of good eyes, and of brains that do not keep them from sleep by night or from work by day, have travelled over this same field, but of most that they gathered it may be said: "To no such aureate earth 'tis turned as, buried once, men want dug up again." I have sat for days in the Harvard University Library among the books bequeathed to it by Parkman (being the greater part of the library which surrounded him in his work--books of history, of travel, and of biography; books about Indians, flints, and folk-lore; maps and guides-among them several guides to Paris--only twenty-five hundred volumes in all); but they are not the material of his magic. His work was not legerdemain, skilful manipulation, but recreation, and he found the aureate earth in the forests, on the prairies, and in documents contemporary to his theme.