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Such use of pictorial observation as “the raindrops strung along the blind,” and “the wet black roofs through mist defined,” is something you will look for in vain through the pages of Longfellow, for instance. This is the sonnet of a realist. So, also, is this one, which does not seem to me to deserve oblivion, and certainly so long as my memory retains its power will have that little span of immortality:

My Anna! when for thee my head was bowed,
The circle of the world, sky, mountain, main,
Drew inward to one spot; and now again
Wide Nature narrows to the shell and shroud.
In the late dawn they will not be forgot,
And evenings early dark; when the low rain
Begins at nightfall, though no tempest rave,
I know the rain is falling on her grave;
The morning views it, and the sunset cloud
Points with a finger to that lonely spot;
The crops, that up the valley rolling go,
Ever toward her slumber bow and blow!
I look on the sweeping corn and the surging rye,
And with every gust of wind my heart goes by!

It must not be supposed that the predominant note in Tuckerman’s poetry is elegiac; rather is it a note of tender, wistful, and scrupulously accurate contemplation of the New England countryside, mingled with spiritual speculation. But as the volume closed with the elegiac poems, and as thereafter no more poems were published, it may be surmised that the poet’s will to create was smothered in the poignant ripple of his personal sorrow. Had it not been, and had his pen continued to write, one cannot help wondering how much closer he would have come to the modern note in poetry. That he already felt a tendency to progress from the old metres to freer forms is constantly apparent; and this tendency, combined with his unconsciously scrupulous realism, might well have brought him near to the present. I should like to close this little paper to his memory with one of his lyrics which throws over rhyme altogether, and strictly formal metre, also, though the fetters are still there. It is the stab of grief which comes through to haunt you, the bare simplicity and the woe. Objective it certainly is not, as the modernists maintain they are. Yet the personal note will always be modern, for it has no age. This lyric belongs to you and me to-day, not in the pages of a forgotten book, on the shelves of a dusty library. I would that some of our vers libre practitioners could equal it:

I took from its glass a flower,
To lay on her grave with dull, accusing tears;
But the heart of the flower fell out as I handled the rose,
And my heart is shattered and soon will wither away.

I watch the changing shadows,
And the patch of windy sunshine upon the hill,
And the long blue woods; and a grief no tongue can tell
Breaks at my eyes in drops of bitter rain.

I hear her baby wagon,
And the little wheels go over my heart:
Oh! when will the light of the darkened house return?
Oh! when will she come who made the hills so fair?

I sit by the parlor window,
When twilight deepens and winds grow cold without;
But the blessed feet no more come up the walk,
And my little girl and I cry softly together.