Parkman and Prescott.
Francis Parkman, the American historian, is an illustrious example of heroic perseverance in the face of great difficulties. He selected as his life work the writing of the history of the rise and fall of the French power in America. He began a most exhaustive research which carried him west into the Black Hills, where the hardships he endured broke down his health and left him a semi-invalid for the rest of his life.
He kept at his appointed task, though fourteen years elapsed between the first part of his work and the second. To occupy the time which his health would not permit him to devote to the greater work, he took up the study of horticulture, in which he grew so proficient that he published a book on roses and was made professor of horticulture in the Harvard Agricultural School.
From 1865 to 1892 he brought out the various parts necessary to complete his great work. During all of this time, however, his health was so precarious that he depended almost entirely upon dictation instead of his pen, and his material was collected for him by hired copyists. The story of his struggle is regarded as one of the most heroic in the history of literature.
William Hickling Prescott was another historian whose labors were made difficult by infirmity. While he was at Harvard he lost the sight of one eye by an accident, and the other was so affected that he was obliged to pass several months in a darkened room. The sight was partly restored, but he could never use it in any trying work, nor more than a little while each day, and he suffered constantly with it and from the apprehension which it occasioned.
With the aid of secretaries and readers he set to work, determined to prepare himself for literature, as more active fields were closed to him. He wrote some himself, in spite of his affliction, using a writing frame designed especially for the blind—and he produced work which placed him in the ranks with the most brilliant historians.