eph Tuckerman, philanthropist and early Unitarian
clergyman, was his uncle. He was a younger brother of Edward
Tuckerman, long famous as a professor of botany at Amherst College,
and who gave his name to Tuckerman's Ravine on Mount Washington.
Frederick Goddard Tuckerman entered Harvard with the class of 1841,
but remained only a year, passing over to the Law School a little
later where he secured his LL.B. in 1842, and for a period evidently
practised law in Boston. "I remember he came back among us at some
kind of gathering during our college course," Colonel Higginson wrote,
"and seemed very friendly and cordial to all. I remember him as a
refined and gentlemanly fellow, but did not then know him as a poet. I
see him put down as a lawyer in Boston (in Adams's _Dictionary of
American Authors_), but I have no recollection of that fact."

It was not until I had written and published in the _Forum_ magazine a
little appreciation of his poetry that I learned from his son, now a
resident of Amherst, Massachusetts, that Frederick Tuckerman, even as
his verses seemed to imply, early moved away from cities to the
beautiful valley under the shadow of the Holyoke Range, and there
passed his days, evidently the world forgetting, and by the world
forgot. He issued his single volume of poems in 1860, when he was
thirty-nine, just before the outbreak of the Civil War, but no shadow
of that coming contest crosses their pages, as it crossed the pages of
Whittier and Emerson, or as it affected the active life of his
classmate Colonel Higginson. The second edition, in 1864, was still
unaffected by the great struggle. He produced his slender sheaf of
poems amid the fields, in quiet introspection, and he might well be
accused of a species of Pharisaism, were these poems not so artlessly
and passionately sincere, and often so tinged with religious awe. His
withdrawal, in his verse, from the life of his times was the act of a
natural recluse.

At the time Tuckerman's poems were issued, it is interesting to
consider briefly some of the poetic influences which affected the
public. The two best-selling poets just then, even in America, were
Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, the latter represented, of course, by
_The Angel in the House_. Indeed, the poems of these two sold better
than novels! Whitman was hardly yet an influence. Julia Ward Howe had
written, and Booth had accepted, a drama in blank verse. Our minor
poets still wrote in the style