So I take the opportunity to pay my tribute to him who long ago put these
figures on the frontier of my imagination, and who has prevented my ever
speaking in dispassion or without favorable prejudice of them.
When Parkman was leaving America for Paris in 1868, "for medical advice
and research," uncertain as to whether he would ever return to take up his
unfinished story of the American forest, he left in the hands of a friend
a parcel, "not to be opened during his life." It is that parcel, not
opened until twenty-five years later--for Parkman lived to return to
America and to return again to Paris more than once, and then to go back
and finish, after a full half-century of struggle with physical maladies
and infirmities, the last book of the plan virtually sketched fifty years
before, and with a singular felicity of coincidence named "The Half-
Century of Conflict"--it is that parcel which has kept for later
generations his remarkable autobiography.
While on his visits in Paris he was known in a wide circle.
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