AN AMERICAN MINOR POET.* THERE are a few English and

many American readers who will recognise in this pleasant volume old acquaintances taken from a larger and in some respects more characteristic collection of poems which appeared in Boston (Massachusetts) in 1854,, though they will find here some beautiful little poems not to be found there. They will recognise in it, moreover, the double-refined manner and classical taste of the Massachusetts. school of literature,— that school which has so often made one feel, in reading Lowell and Longfellow, and even Haw- thorne, that whatever gifts the New World has added or taken away, it has at least cultivated a taste more scrupulous and' fastidious than even European capitals can boast. Dr. Parsons, as represented at least in the volume which he has just published in London, belongs completely to this school. You find in him, too, that evanescent flavour of the Elizabethan literary air which seems to haunt all schools wherein manner counts for even more than matter, as if this touch of sixteenth-ceaturyism were a sort of intellectual tribute-money which learned men cannot forbear to pay to the age in which the spirit of modern literature was born. Take, for example, the following delicate little poem on Guido's "Aurora," that beautiful picture known to most of us,— the present reviewer included,—only by engravings, but by some of the finest engravings of which the engraver's art can boast :— "Gum's Auaorts.—(In the Rospigliosi Palace, Rome.)

La concubine di Titone antico Gilt a' imbiancava at balzo d' orient°, Fuor dells breccia del suo doles amico Di gemme Ia sua fronts era lacente.—POBOATOSIO,

"Forth from the arms of her beloved now, Whitening the Orient steep, the Concubine Of old Tithonus comes, her lucent brow Glistening with gems, her fair hands filled with flowers,.

That drop their violet odours on the brine, While from her girdle pours a wealth of pearls Round ocean's rocks and every vessel's prow That cuts the laughing billow's crested curls.

Behind her step the busy, sober Hours,

With much to do ;—and they must move apace : Wake up Apollo ! should the women stir,

And thou be lagging? brighten up thy face!.

(Those eyes of Phaeton more brilliant were) Hurry, dull God ! Hyperion, to thy race ! Thy steeds are galloping, but thou seem'st slow :

Beeper, glad wretch, bath newly fed his torch,

And flies before thee, and the world cries, Go !

Light the dark woods, the dew-drenched mountain scorch!: Phcebns, Aurora calls, why linger so ?"

There the only mannerism which seems to our ear somewhat aril- ficial,—the epithet "glad wretch" applied to Hesper, who is flying in the west as Aurora touches the east with light,—is a mere piece of tribute-money paid to the great age to which our English litera- ture owes its origin. The verses are otherwise a perfect reflec- tion of the picture, and it is hardly possible to say anything higher in praise of a purely descriptive effort. Of course, like every re- flection of the achievement of one great art by another, it is not so much mere reflection as interpretation. It is a poem which should be read by the side of the late Mr. W. C. Roscoe's exquisite. sonnet on a kindred subject, Gibson's statue of Aurora ; where no doubt there is leas room for description, and more is necessarily supplied by the imagination than was possible in the rendering or Guido's wonderful picture.f The same love of refinement, we might almost say over-love of it, which we have so often remarked in the higher New England literature, appears in almost every poem in the volume,—of a, few of which we might almost say that the thought has been strained till it has left little except graceful language behind it, like the lines "To Josephine . . . . with Ivy Leaves," or the lines on " Roslin Chapel." On the other hand, to some poems, which embody the true cry' of deep feeling, it gives an air or delicate simplicity and purity, for instance, to the following, written

The Shadow of the Obelisk, and other Poonu. By Thomas William Parsons._ London ; Hatchards.

t As some of our readers may not know the sonnet to which we refer, and it is a.

very fine literary pendant to Dr. Parsons', we will transcribe it here:— GIBBON'S STATUS OF AURORA..

"Fair unto all men, shining Morning, seems Thy face serene, when a new day unrolls, And all old sights and long-endured doles Seem fresh and bearable in thy bright beams.

But only to the dreamers of sweet dreams, The visionary apprehensive souls Whose finer insight no dim sense controls,

Comet thou in this fair shape o'er Ocean's streams,— Thy white foot hanging on an Eastern wave,

And thy swept garments blown by early air; In thy two hands rich urns, pow'rful to save From darkness and the terror of the grave; And in thy face calm victory dost thou wear Over the night and terror and despair."

Our readers will observe that here, too, is the half-evanescent fli.vour of the Elizabethan manner, especially lathe use of the old-fashioned word doles.' for griefs.

from Wayland, Massachusetts, of one couplet at least of which, --the one we italicize,—Wordsworth himself would have been proud :—

" To HENRY WADSWORTH L02■10FELLOW

"Think not that this enchanted isle Wherein I dwell, some days a king, Postpones till June its tardy smile, And only knows imagined spring.

"Not yet my lilies are in bloom ; But lo! my cherry, bridal white, Whose sweetness fills my sunny room, The bees, and me, with one delight.

"And on the brink of Lanham Brook The laughing cowslips catch mine eye, As on the bridge I stop to look At the stray blossoms loitering by.

"Our almond-willow waves its plumes

In contrast with the dark-haired pine, And in the morning sun perfumes The lane almost like summer's vine.

"Dear Poet! shouldst thou tread with mo, Even in the spring, these woodland ways, Under thy foot the violet see, And overhead the maple sprays, "Though mightst forego thy Charles's claim, To wander by our stream awhile : So should these meadows grow to fame, And all the Muses haunt our Isle."

It is only now and then that Dr. Parsons rises into that higher intensity of feeling where the very simplicity of structure itself expresses the strength and truth of the thought. Grace is the chief charm of his verse, as it is exhibited in this volume; but, as in the verses we have just quoted, once and again it transcends grace, and clothes itself in a form so natural and so musical as to take a living bold of the mind. Perhaps the stanzas on a picture by Schoeffer of Francesca da Rimini present as fine a specimen as we could take, after the beautiful lines we have just quoted, though the final verse strikes us as falling off in some degree from the power of the first two :—

" FRANCESCA DA RDENL—(A Picture by Schceffer.)

"You restless ghosts that roam the lurid air, I feel your misery,—for I was there ; Yea, not in dreams, but breathing and alive, Have seen the storm, and heard the tempest drive: Yet while the sleet went, withering as it past, And the mad hail gave scourges to the blast, While all was black below, and flame above, Have thought,—'tie little to the storm of Love : You know that sadly, know it to your cost, Ah, too much loving, and for ever lost!

"Still, suffering spirits, even your doom affords Kisses and tears, however scant of words; Brief is your story, but it liveth long,— Oh ! thank for that your poet and his song: Be it Borne comfort, in that hateful Hell, You had a lover of your love to tell ; One that know all,—the ecstasy, the gloom, All the sad raptures that precede the tomb ;

The fluttering hope, the triumph, and the care,—

The wild emotion, and the sure despair.

"Not every friend hath friendship's finer touch, To pardon passion, when it mounts too much ; Not every soul bath proved its own excess, And feared the throb it still would not repress ; But he whose numbers gave you unto fame, Lord of the lay,—I need not speak his name,— Was one who felt; whose life was love or hate; Born for extremes, he scorned the middle state; And well he knew that, since the world began, The heart was master in the world of man."

But as we hinted in our opening sentence, we doubt if Dr. Par- sons has been quite wise in straining out all his less classical pieces from that former volume in many respects more clearly marked by his individual talent which he published in Boston some eighteen years ago. Of that volume the characteristic note was a cer- tain caustic humour which has nearly disappeared from this,— caustic humour that carried with it an air of greater freedom and power than Dr. Parsons' more mature taste seems quite to approve. There is a "Saratoga Eclogue" in that volume, a caustic dialogue between an American 'rityrus and Melibceus at Saratoga Springs, which, if it contains some banter not altogether of the immortal kind, still has mach in it which Hood would have enjoyed and Praed have envied ; and again, there are lines addressed to the late Mr. Moxon on the death of a brother publisher full of sharp humour which almost all Englishmen would enjoy. We do not say that Dr. Parsons' higher and more beautiful lyrics are not better worth preserving than these bantering stanzas, but we do think that somehow the verses of higher feeling gain in power and significance when read amongst the light productions of his youth, and lose when separated from them and relegated to a volume con-

taining little or no sign of the individual humour which is one of hie chief characteristics. Read this, for example, from Dr. Parsons' elegy on a great departed power of Paternoster Row, and the lovely verses addressed to Longfellow, from Wayland, Massa- chusetts, and the beautiful sonnet on Guido's Aurora, will rise instead of falling in value in our minds :— " 'Tie not lost genius we lament the most,

No; but the man, the old companion lost :

Who'd not give more to bring back GILBERT GURNEE,

Or Saari; or MarruEws, from his nether journey,

Than all your MILTONS or your BACONS dead, Or all the BONAPARTES that ever bled ;

So, ware the blue rotundity of heaven By some muck-running, outlawed comet riven,

Should any orb—say yonder blazing Mars—

Be blotted from the muster-roll of stars,

HaRSCHBL might groan, or Royal Airy sigh, But what would London care 7—or you, or I?

We vulgar folk might count it greater loss, Should some stray earthquake swallow Charing Cross.

"Now let no pigmy poet, in his pride,

The humble memory of our friend deride :

More than he dreams, his little species owe

Those good allies, the Patrons of the Row :

They, only they, of all the friends who praise, All who forgive, and all who love your lays, Of all that flatter, all that wish you well, Sincerely care to have your volume sell. How oft, when Quarterlies are most severe, And every critic aims a ready sneer, And young Ambition just begins to cool, And Genius half suspects himself a fool, The placid publisher, the more they rail, Forebodes the triumph of a speedy sale, And gently lays the soul-sustaining balm Of twenty sovereigns in your trembling palm ; While more than speech his manner seems to say,

As bland he whispers, 'Dine with me to-day.'"

It is not that there is anything very admirable in banter of that kind,. but that the effect of poetry always depends more or leas on the general character of the mind that produces it, and that we value the lyrical aide of feeling far more when we know that the judgment, taste, and general temper of the mind which produced it. incline the writer to jest with others and himself at his own ex- pense, than we do if we are apt to think that the higher senti- ments come out of a nature which does not know the weak side of human sentiment as well as the strong. We venture to regret, therefore, while thanking Dr. Parsons heartily for various beautiful poems in this volume, that he has not included among his selections a few of the more humorous and satirical.

productions of his youth. For instance, we could willingly have exchanged the poem from which this volume derives its name,—" The Shadow of the Obelisk," a poem written at Rome, for which we do not greatly care, — for one of the more lively versified letters of his former volume. At the same time, we gladly admit that the best poems in the new volume are new, and apparently the products of his maturest mind. We have quoted some of them, and cannot do better than end our notice of the volume with the beautiful Christmas lines with which it closes, written only last year :—

" MY SUDBURY MISTLETOE.

"This hallowed stem the Druids once adored, And now I wreathe it round my bleeding Lord, So might my spirit around his image twine, And find support, as in its oak a vine !

" ' I am the Vine :'—He said; Lord, then let me Be just a tendril clinging to the tree Where the Jews nailed thee bodily, to grow Fruit for all fainting souls that grope below.

"May this green hope that in my heart is born Blossom before another Christmas morn ! Then my weird mistletoe I'll cast away, And hang up lilies to record the day."