"This town, in olden times of stake and flame, A famous nest of Puritans became: Sad, rigid souls, who hated as they ought The carnal arms wherewith the devil fought; Dancing and dicing, music, and whate'er Spreads for humanity the pleasing snare. Stage-plays, especially, their hearts abhorred, Holding the muses hateful to the Lord, Save when old Sternhold and his brother bard Oped their hoarse throats, and strained an anthem hard. From that angelic race of perfect men (Sure, seraphs never trod the world till then!) Descends the race to whom the sway is given Of the world's morals by confiding Heaven."
There was always a strain of true religious feeling in Parsons, which deepened at the last into something rapt and intense; but Puritanism never ceased to be hateful to him, and this antagonism contributed to make him feel that his footsteps were on alien soil. An artist first of all, he was drawn more toward the services of the ancient Church, for whose adornment art has so bountifully poured out its treasures, than to any balder form of worship. To him the world was a problem in beauty and emotion. He was not incommoded with a message, as so many of his contemporaries were. This has been, perhaps, to the detriment of his reputation in the past; it may be to its advantage in the future. The man who speaks too consciously a message to his own time is apt to have none for any other. Parsons wrought from first to last in the true artistic spirit, and it is not unlikely that his chief claims to the recognition of the future will be found in qualities of form and style.
Not the least among these qualities will be that sturdy literary independence which, amid the widespread æsthetic revival of this century, achieved a success of a purely æsthetic nature on lines entirely unaffected by the contemporary fashion. In a time of metrical experiment, and of the new and strange harmonies of Rossetti and Swinburne, he alone of the artistic school of poets, uninfluenced even by Coleridge or Shelley, worked in the severe methods of an earlier day. Dryden and Pope seem to have been his earliest masters, but not for long. The versification of Dryden, which Keats learned to appreciate at its true value, remained always to some extent a factor in Parsons's art, but he soon threw over the jingle of Pope's measure for the fuller, statelier, and in truth simpler manner of Collins and Gray. Yet his matured style is neither that of Collins, with whom he had close resemblances, personal and poetical, nor that of Gray, though unquestionably akin to both. Parsons had, besides, a certain bent for plain words and homely images that sometimes became Dantesque. Indeed, the lifelong study which he gave to Dante could not be without its influence on his own expression--an influence potent for strength and directness.