class="i2">Back to my heart, and in a sturdier mood
I turn my eyes toward the distance dim,
And in the purple far infinitude
Watch the white ships sink under the sea-rim;

XLIV.

SOME bound for Flemish ports or Genovese,
Some for Bermuda bound, or Baltimore;
Others, perchance, for further Orient seas,
Sumatra and the straits of Singapore,
Or antique cities of remote Cathay,
Or past Gibraltar and the Libyan shore,
Through Bab-el-mandeb eastward to Bombay;

XLV.

NOTES

THOMAS WILLIAM PARSONS.

The subject of this elegy was born at Boston in 1819, and educated at the Boston Latin School. While yet a young man he visited England and Italy, with which latter country and its literature his life was to be so largely occupied. From early youth he was a devoted student of Dante, to the translation of whose "Divine Comedy" he chiefly applied his scholarship and poetic genius. In 1854 he published a volume of original poems, among which were the famous verses, "On a Bust of Dante," which found their way at once into all the anthologies. Several other volumes were privately printed, and in 1892 he published "Circum Præcordia," which contained, besides a versification of the collects of the Church as set forth in the Book of Common Prayer, about a dozen original poems of a religious nature. The translation of the first ten cantos of the "Inferno" was published in 1843, and the complete "Inferno" in 1867. The opening cantos of the "Purgatorio" were issued in 1876, and the remaining cantos were afterward completed and are now in process of publication. In 1870 Mr. Parsons was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Reale Accademia de' Fisiocritici in Siena. He died at Scituate, Mass., September 3, 1892.

"Dr. Parsons holds a place of his own. He is one of those rare poets whose infrequent work is so beautiful as to make us wish for more. In quality, at least, it is of a kind with Landor's; his touch is sure, and has at command the choicer modes of lyrical art—those which, although fashion may overslaugh them, return again, and enable a true poet to be quite as original as when hunting devices previously unessayed. His independence on the other hand, is exhibited in his free renderings of Dante....

"Parsons's briefer poems often are models, but occasionally show a trace of that stiffness which too little employment gives even the hand of daintier sense. 'Lines on a Bust of Dante,' in structure, diction, loftiness of thought, is the peer of any modern lyric in our tongue. Inversion, the vice of stilted poets, becomes with him an excellence, and old forms and accents are rehandled and charged with life anew. It is to be regretted that Dr. Parsons has not used his gift more freely. He has been a poet for poets, rather than for the people; but many types are required to fill out the hemicycle of a nation's literature."

—Stedman's Poets of America.

"The study of a great man is an education. Dr. Parsons has been an unwearied student of Dante for thirty years [1869], and has reaped commensurate benefits from the familiarity. His lines to the immortal Florentine, by common consent, are ranked with the very noblest efforts of the American Muse. Among the other traits in the matchless style of Dante, are his unique conciseness and precision. His descriptions are coined rather than painted; his metaphors are not pictures, but medallions. This artistic horror of slovenly work, this conscientious finish of severe simplicity and force, the apt pupil shares with the great master."

—W. R. Alger.

"He occupies some such place in American poetry as Gray or Collins does in English poetry, not having written much, but extremely well. The poet is not living in the country who could have written a stronger, grander poem than that on the 'Bust of Dante,' beginning:

—Wm. Hayes Ward.

STANZA I.

This poem was written in Windsor, Nova Scotia, at Kingscroft, the residence of Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts, where the author was staying when the news of the poet's death reached him. Kingscroft is situated on the edge of a beautiful wood of great fir-trees on an elevation overlooking the Avon River and the Basin of Minas.

STANZA III.

Scituate, where the poet died, is a village lying midway between Boston and Plymouth on that part of the coast of Massachusetts which is known as the South Shore. The country is of a gently undulating character, and the view seaward is across salt marshes broken here and there with low hillocks of a sandy formation.

STANZA XIV.

The poet Whittier died but a few days after the death of Parsons.

STANZA XV.

Oliver Wendell Holmes.

Edmund Clarence Stedman.

Whittier, in dedicating one of his volumes to Stedman, called him "Poet, and Friend of Poets."