im grassy flower and night-lit spark,
Still move me on and upward for the True;
Seeking through change, growth, death, in new and old
The full in few, the statelier in the less,
With patient pain; always remembering this--
His hand, who touched the sod with showers of gold,
Stippled Orion on the midnight blue.

And so, as this great sphere (now turning slow
Up to the light from that abyss of stars,
Now wheeling into gloom through sunset bars)
With all its elements of form and flow,
And life in life, where crown'd yet blind must go
The sensible king--is but a Unity
Compressed of motes impossible to know;
Which worldlike yet in deep analogy
Have distance, march, dimension and degree;
So the round earth--which we the world do call--
Is but a grain in that which mightiest swells,
Whereof the stars of light are particles,
As ultimate atoms of one infinite Ball
On which God moves, and treads beneath His feet the All!

Turning the page we come on a poem called _The Question_. "How shall I
array my love?" he asks, and ranges the earth for costly jewels and
silks from Samarcand; but because his love is a simple New England
maid, he rejects them all as unworthy and inappropriate, and closing
sings:

The river-riches of the sphere,
All that the dark sea-bottoms bear,
The wide earth's green convexity,
The inexhaustible blue sky,
Hold not a prize so proud, so high,
That it could grace her, gay or grand,
By garden-gale and rose-breath fanned;
Or as to-night I saw her stand,
Lovely in the meadow land,
With a clover in her hand.

Have not these lines a magic simplicity? It seems so to me. They flow
rippling and bright to the inevitable finish, and there is no more to
say.

Tuckerman's power of close yet magical observation, used not so much
in the Tennysonian way (for Tennyson was a close observer, make no
mistake about that) as in what we now think of as the modern way, that
is, as a part of the realistic record of homely events, with beauty
only as a by-product, is well illustrated in the opening lines of a
narrative poem called _The School Girl, a New England Idyll_. Here
again a kinship with Frost is seen, rather than with Tuckerman's
contemporaries:

The wind, that all the day had scarcely clashed
The cornstalks in the sun, as the sun sank
Came rolling up the valley like a wave,