"_Far off where Scituate lapses to the sea._"
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.
The poet WHITTIER died but a few days after the death of Parsons.
... "_save one whose smile Is gentler for its memories,_"
Whittier, in dedicating one of his volumes to Stedman, called him "Poet, and Friend of Poets."
"_And the lone voice of Arizonian song,_"
"_The Greek revealer of Canadian skies,_"
... "_in fireside bonds Near to the dead,_"
THOMAS BUFORD METEYARD, the painter, a relation of Dr. PARSONS.
"_The mild historian of the Sudbury Inn,_"
LONGFELLOW. The old tavern at Sudbury was the scene of "The Tales of a Wayside Inn." Parsons was the original of the Poet in that volume, and his brother-in-law, Luigi Monti, of the Sicilian, to whom allusion is also made in this stanza.
The home of Bayard Taylor, between whom and Lanier an intimate bond of friendship existed.
"_But who is this, that from the mightier shades Emerges,_"
... "_now, of lineament Not stern but strenuous still,_"
"How stern of lineament, how grim The father was of Tuscan song."
"_Time, like a wind, blows through the lyric leaves Above his head, and from the shaken boughs Æonian music falls;_"
[Greek: amphi de psychron keladei di' ysdôn malinôn, aithyssomenôn de phyllôn kôma katarrei.]
The Cape of Good Hope, originally called the Cape of Tempests. It is here that the spectral ship of Vanderdecken is supposed to be seen in stormy weather, still battling against the insuperable wind. Vanderdecken, the "Flying Dutchman," tried to double the cape in spite of a heavy gale. Baffled again and again, he swore that he would carry out his purpose in spite of God or the Devil, though he had to sail till the Day of Judgment. For this blasphemy he was doomed to be taken at his word, and became a sort of Ahasuerus of the sea. This cape is also the scene of that tremendous passage in the "Lusiad," where the giant, Adamastor, appears in cloud and storm to the adventurous Portuguese sailors, and warns them back from their enterprise: