La Salle and the discovery of the great West - North Central ...

1687.] HIS CHARACTER. 431Champlain was not the enthusiasm of La Salle ; norhad he any part in the self-devoted zeal of the earlyJesuit explorers. He belonged not to the age of theknight-errant and the saint, but to the modern worldof practical study and practical action. He was thehero not of a principle nor of a faith, but simply ofa fixed idea and a determined purpose. As oftenhappens with concentred and energetic natures, hispurpose was to him a passion and an inspiration ; andhe clung to it with a certain fanaticism of devotion.It was the offspring of an ambition vast and comprehensive,yet acting in the interest both of France andof civilization.Serious in all things, incapable of the lighterpleasures, incapable of repose, finding no joy but inthe pursuit of great designs, too shy for society and Jtoo reserved for popularity, often unsympathetic andalways seeming so, smothering emotions which hecould not utter, schooled to universal distrust, sternto his followers and pitiless to himself, bearing thebrunt of every hardship and every danger, demandingof others an equal constancy joined to an implicitdeference, heeding no counsel but his own, attemptingthe impossible and grasping at what was too vastto hold, —he contained in his own complex and painfulnature the chief springs of his triumphs, hisfailures, and his death.It is easy to reckon up his defects, but it is noteasy to hide from sight the Roman virtues thatredeemed them. Beset by a throng of enemies, he