To Miss Seward
On Reading Her Centenary of Sonnets
Dear are the forceful energies of Song,
For they do swell the spring-tide of the heart
With rosier currents, and impel along
The life-blood freely:—O! they can impart
Raptures ne’er dreamt of by the sordid throng
Who barter human feeling at the mart
Of pamper’d selfishness, and thus do wrong
Imperial Nature of her prime desert.—
Seward! thy strains, beyond the critic-praise
Which may to arduous skill its meed assign,
Can the pure sympathies of spirit raise
To bright Imagination’s throne divine;
And proudly triumph, with a generous strife,
O’er all the “flat realities of life.”
High Street, Marybone,
Feb. 1, 1799.
T. PARK.