that keeps him poor, too!

[Illustration]

_A Forgotten American Poet_

I have written the title, "A forgotten American poet," and I shall let
it stand, though I am not sure that he was ever well enough known to
be spoken of now as forgotten. Ten or a dozen years ago a friend of
mine who was working on an anthology of American poetry, at the John
Carter Brown library in Providence, wrote to me with great enthusiasm
of a poet he had "discovered," and of whom he had never heard before.
"His name is Frederick Goddard Tuckerman," my friend said, "and you
will not find him in Stedman's anthology, though it seems incredible
that Stedman left out anybody or anything. Get a copy of his poems if
you can--Ticknor and Fields, 1860."

I sent in my order for the book, to Goodspeed's, and then forgot the
incident. But Goodspeed didn't. A year later the book came. Evidently
it is an infrequent item at the auctions. The copy I received was a
second edition, dated 1864 (which seems to indicate the poems had
found some readers), but still in the familiar brown of Ticknor and
Fields, matching my first American editions of _The Angel in the
House_. This copy was of special interest because it was a
presentation copy from the author to Harriet Beecher Stowe. The leaves
had been opened, but if Mrs. Stowe read, she had made no marginal
comments. The only addition to the book was an old newspaper clipping
pasted in the back--a condensed history of the Beecher family! I read
the volume myself with increasing interest and enthusiasm, and at the
close I desired to learn more of Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, not of
the Beechers. Mr. Stedman's complete omission of these poems could
only have been explained, I felt, by an equally complete ignorance of
their existence. Compared to the poems of Henry T. Tuckerman, included
by Stedman, the verses of his unknown cousin were as gold to copper.
Why, I wondered, had this man been so completely obliterated by Time,
or why had he failed in his life to reach a niche where Time could not
utterly efface him?

I wrote to Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who, I discovered, had
been a classmate of Tuckerman's at Harvard, and who of course knew
practically everybody of consequence in the literary world of his
generation. Colonel Higginson was able to supply some data, but not
much. Tuckerman was born in 1821, of a rather well-known Boston
family. Jos