of Pope, and the narrative shared
honors with the moral platitude in popular regard. Tennyson, of
course, was a great poet, and Patmore no mean one, even at that time,
but it is questionable whether the huge popular success of their
works, such as _The Princess_ and _The Angel in the House_, was due
to their strictly poetic merits. At any rate, the poetry of Frederick
Goddard Tuckerman, lacking narrative interest, palatable platitudes,
lyric lilt, but being, rather, contemplative, aloof, delicately minor
and in many ways curiously modern, must have fallen on ears not
attuned to it. He had none of the Bolshevik revolutionary vitality of
Whitman, to thrive and grow by the opposition he created. He could
have aroused no opposition. It would have been his happy fate to find
men and women who could appreciate his delicate observation of nature,
his golden bursts of imaginative vigor, his wistful, contemplative
melancholy, his disregard of academic form less because it hampered
him than because he was careless of anything but the exact image. Such
readers it was apparently not his fate to find in sufficient numbers
to bring him fame. He was, in a sense, a modern before his time, but
without sufficient consciousness of his modernity to fight. He was a
mute, inglorious Robert Frost--like Frost for one year a Harvard
student, like him retiring to the New England countryside, like him
intent chiefly on rendering the commonplace beauty of that countryside
into something magical because so true. Only he lacked Frost's
dramatic sense, and interest in human problems.

Tuckerman's favorite medium was the sonnet; but a sonnet to him was a
thing of fourteen five-foot iambic lines, and there all rules ended.
Sometimes he even crowded six feet into a line. It is possible his
laxness of form was due to ignorance, but more likely that it was due
to a greater interest in his mood than in the "rules" of poetry. Many
of his sonnets were in sequence, one flowing into the next. Here are
two, thus unified, which show in flashes his sweep of imaginative
phrase, and his transcendental bent:

The starry flower, the flower-like stars that fade
And brighten with the daylight and the dark--
The bluet in the green I faintly mark,
The glimmering crags with laurel overlaid,
Even to the Lord of light, the Lamp of shade,
Shine one to me--the least, still glorious made
As crowned moon or heaven's great hierarch.
And so, d