Every one should read his "Autobiography," his "Hero Tales from
American History" which he wrote in company with Senator Lodge,
and his "Letters to His Children." His early accounts of hunting
in the West make good reading, but in his book about his African
hunt, and in the one on the South American trip, he probably
reached his highest level as a writer. If any American has written
better books of travel than these, more continuously interesting,
fuller of pleasing detail about the little incidents, the birds
and tiny animals which he encountered, and at the same time with a
stricter regard for accuracy of observation, I do not know where
they are to be found.
This man of politics had a true poetic feeling for the countries
he visited; time and again he moves his readers in describing the
wonders of the great waste places, the melancholy deserts and
wildernesses, the deadly fascination of the jungle, and the awful
glory of the tropic dawns and sunsets. When something awakened his
imagination he could write passages full of the magic of poetry.
Witness this, it is not a description of scenery, but a vision of
the true historian of the future:
The true historian will bring the past before our eyes as if it
were the present. He will make us see as living men the hard-faced
archers of Agincourt, and the war-worn spear-men who followed
Alexander down beyond the rim of the known world.
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