proves that Parsons knew how to put into practice that strenuous counsel of his own:
"But something rough and resolute and sour Should with the sweetness of the soul combine; For although gentleness be part of power, 'Tis only strength makes gentleness divine."
With the masterly technical power and equipment that Parsons undoubtedly had, why did he not do more? Why is his permanent original contribution to English literature limited to a few lyrics? For this I can find no better reason than that which I have already suggested, that, being out of sympathy with his time, he found no theme for his song. The achievements of this age he admired, when at all, as an outsider, and frequently his attitude was the reverse of admiration. Homers must have their Agamemnons as well as Agamemnons their Homers; and to-day was not heroic to Parsons. To him the railway suggested nothing but
and commercial greatness smacked ever of the Philistine. He would probably have been as uncomfortable in Athens as in Boston; and while he could love Venice dead, Venice living (where, as so often in history, Trade and Art went out hand in hand, conquering and to conquer) would have been as distasteful as Chicago. It is true that the traders of Athens and the Adriatic braved great personal dangers, and brought back from their voyages strange and gorgeous fabrics, "barbaric pearl and gold," and tales of incredible adventure in the unknown world. Our modern conquests, in commerce as in science, with some notable exceptions, are of a more impalpable kind, and make no such sensuous appeal to the imagination. And so, for some, the circumnavigation of the globe has ended all romance, even though the unknown be still as mysteriously present in New York as in the "shining vales of Har."
The risk and the imagination involved in modern achievement are enormous, and even the element of personal danger is by no means eliminated; and if there were vulgar things in the conquest of California, I doubt not there were also vulgar things, more nearly of the same kind than we are apt to think, in the conquest of Gaul. But anybody can see the vulgarity. It is the poet's function to show that this is a mere accident, and that the essential reality still throbs as ever with a lyric rapture; that