A poet of Boston who for some years practiced his profession of dentistry there. The quality of his writing is uneven, but in such poems as the “Lines on the Bust of Dante,” and “When Francesca Sings,” he is at his best. His work includes a much-admired though incomplete translation in English verse of “Dante’s Divina Commedia,” of which an edition was issued in 1893, with introduction by C. E. Norton, and memorial sketch by Miss Guiney; “Ghetto di Roma;” “The Magnolia;” “The Old Home at Sudbury;” “The Shadow of the Obelisk, and other Poems” (1893).

Personal

	Friend who hast gone, and dost enrich to-day
	New England brightly building far away,
	And crown her liberal walk
	With company more choice, and sweeter talk,
	Look not on Fame, but Peace; and in a bower
	Receive at last her fulness and her power:
	Nor wholly, pure of heart!
	Forget thy few, who would be where thou art.

  During the last twenty-five or thirty years a tall, slight figure, somewhat bent of late, with Dantean eyebrows overhanging eyes of a singularly penetrative sweetness when they looked at you, was a frequent figure on the streets of Boston. Here and there it encountered a friendly glance of recognition, but to the hurrying throng in the city of his birth Thomas William Parsons was virtually a stranger. The passers-by, brushing against him, were unconscious that that shy man with the inward-looking eyes was a poet of rare gifts, who, however lacking in variousness, occasionally managed in his own direct artesian way to pierce as deep as any of his great contemporaries, excepting, possibly, Emerson…. He was a man of great simplicity and alert sympathies; a charming companion, when he was out of his cloud, and even when in his cloud, a most courteous dreamer. That he sometimes dropped his reserve with me, in his enthusiasm over some question of literature or art, is now among my cherished memories.

  Dr. Parsons was emphatically a man of moods. He could be merry with the merriest and jolly with the jolliest, changing suddenly

From grave to gay, from lively to severe.

He had the keenest sense of the ludicrous; nothing escaped his observing eyes or his subtle irony…. What delightful recollections come to me of hours spent in the charming home in Scituate where was dispensed a genuine hospitality! The latch-string was always out for friends. One often met there uniquely interesting guests, and days passed in such delightsome company were red-letter days indeed. In the unconventional atmosphere of that home, so invigorating to breathe, reigned wit and jollity. These golden days were enlivened by sparkling repartee, the impromptu rhyme, merry games, songs written by Dr. Parsons, delightfully sung by his niece Francesca. In that never-to-be-forgotten home “plain living and high thinking” were exemplified.

General

  His poems stand out in relief from the mass of American versification, by the ripe accomplishments of mind they show, by the artistic atmosphere they breathe, and by the rare combination in them of fulness of matter with finish of form. The strength of his thought, the genuineness of his humor, the delicate sureness of his touch, the profound tenderness of his feeling, the completeness of his artistic skill, the perfect vitality of his work, now appreciated by one and another, soon by more and more, will finally enroll him among the select classics of his land; destined to be honored ages after the mediocrities who at first surpassed them in fame have been forgotten…. He is never flat, never stilted, never verbose, never bombastic, never affected. He is one of the truest of the humorists who have set pen to paper in this country. Nothing ridiculous escapes his keen and competent eye; and he portrays it with a smiling ease, a sound judgment, and a polished brevity, comparable with those of the best workmen in this department. Those who would rather laugh in their minds than by explosions of the organs of cachinnation, will search far before they can find a more delightfully enjoyable satire than the “Saratoga Eclogue.”

  Parsons’ 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.

	“O Time! whose verdicts mock our own,
	The only righteous judge art thou.”

This judge, in a generation, has not established Dr. Parsons’ reputation on any other basis than that on which may stand a minor poet of thought and grace; nor will Parsons sing for a larger future. To-day his books hold forth some few finely-wrought verses, enriched by culture, adorned by the touch of beauty, and occasionally illumined by the light of the land of Dante’s vision, described by Dr. Parsons in his “Paradisi Gloria:”

	“There is a city builded by no hand,
	And unapproachable by sea or shore,
	And unassailable by any band
	Of storming soldiery forever more.”

  His characteristic at his best is great sensibility of impression, great control and discipline of expression. He is one of those who speak from the stress of emotion—as few men do, as few women can—without any explosion of sensation. However you feel his genius, you must feel first its high-bred, forerunning condition of art. He is not reticent, but his saving accent makes you think him so. His themes are often such as would seem to evade and decline adequate language, and he can always present them with masterful delicacy and terseness. Upon him, who is akin to no one else,

“The marks have sunk of Dante’s mind.”

It is not in vain that for nearly fifty years he has had great companionship, paying for it his magnificent coin of interpretation to the English world. What he has won thereby is not an actual gain, but the precious vivifying and clarifying of his poetic gift. In his thrusting, lance-like humor, his high-handed individuality, his genuine pathos, his secure scholarship, his literary equipment, his scorn of pomp and artifice, his large, patient note of patriotism and brotherliness, his irresistible reverence of what is reverend, and antagonism of the world’s paltry aims; above all, in his conception and treatment of religion and of love, Dr. Parsons is markedly Dante’s man…. Artistic governance is the sign-manual of Dr. Parsons’ rapt verse, which, never tame nor timid, has a restrained and tempered glow of Phaethon holding his horses in. His “Paradisi Gloria” has caught all the beams of the Christian heaven, and prisons them as in an opal.

  Parsons was probably Gray’s inferior in point of taste, for otherwise we can hardly understand how he could put forth in the same volume, and sometimes in the same poem, such inequalities as he permitted himself. Yet it must be said, as an offset to this, that he seldom made himself responsible for a poem by publishing it. He occasionally had verses in the magazines, and even, if the whim took him, in the newspapers; but only twice in his life did he bring the question of his critical judgment fairly within the scope of comment by issuing a volume to the public. The first of these volumes, which contains the famous “Lines on a Bust of Dante,” may perhaps rely upon the youth of its author as an explanation of its unevenness. The other, “Circum Præcordia,” published in the year of his death, and consisting of a versification of the collects of the Church together with a few original poems of a religious character, is of even and sustained excellence, though rising to the level of his best work only in the concluding poem, “Paradisi Gloria.” Mrs. Parsons had several other volumes printed for private circulation only, but of these the author frequently knew nothing until the bound copies were placed in his hands. What he would himself now select to give to the world no one can tell; possibly as carefully edited a volume as even that of Gray. Such a volume would, I believe, be one of the treasures of American verse,—a book that lovers of poetry would carry with them as they would similar thin volumes of Herrick, Marvell, Collins, or Landor. The lyrics addressed to Francesca are true Herrick for grace and daintiness, and there is nothing in Landor finer than such passages.

  Dr. Parsons had much in common with Landor, outside of the Englishman’s fine moroseness. Each possessed that delicate precision of touch which, to the observing, betrays the steel gauntlet under the velvet glove. Both were scholars, both loved Italy, and both wrote marvelously finished verse, which poets praised, and the public neglected to read. Dr. Parsons’s lighter lyrics have a grace and distinction which make it difficult to explain why they failed to win wide liking. That his more serious work failed to do so is explicable. Such austere poetry as the stanzas “On a Bust of Dante,” for instance, is not to the taste of the mass of readers: but such poetry, once created, becomes a part of the material world; it instantly takes to itself the permanency of mountains, prairies, and rivers; it seems always to have existed…. The study of the great Florentine and his period was a life-long pursuit of Dr. Parsons. His translation of “The Divine Comedy,” so far as he carried it, for it was left like “the unfinished window in Aladdin’s tower,” places him in the first rank of Dante’s disciples. He brought to this labor of love something of his master’s own passion. Whether or not the translation is literal in detail, Dr. Parsons’s fragmentary versions have a spell beyond that of all other metrical versions, in being poems in themselves.

  He occupies in American literature a place somewhat analogous to that held in English literature by Gray and Collins, having written only a few poems, but those of surpassing excellence.

  He did not write much, but nearly all is precious for its justness of thought and feeling, its classic finish, artistic restraint, and terse strength, without frigidity, and its occasional quiet pleasantry and Attic wit.

  The charm of his writings is in their chaste and earnest diction, in the highest form of art. He was never a poet of the people, though no collection of American poetry seems complete without his “Lines on a Bust of Dante.” His verse is strong and clear, and in its sincere, devout spirit seems like an earnest protest against many of the tendencies in modern life and thought. An elaborate edition of his translation of the “Inferno” was published in 1867. It naturally challenged comparison with that of Longfellow, appearing in the same year. While not so faithful as that of the elder poet, its very freedom enables the translator the better to preserve the spirit of the original. For the general reader rather than the student it must be admitted to be the more readable of the two.

  After all, the touch of genius to be found in Dr. Parsons is probably not shown concretely by his translation or by his own poems, but rather by his capacity to give himself up so completely and so beautifully to his pursuit of a noble ideal. For it is surely a noble ideal to steep one’s self in a poem and a poet so noble as the “Divine Comedy” and Dante, not merely for self-gratification and elevation, but in order that one’s fellow-countrymen may be allowed to share in one’s joy and profit.