the dry brown threads, and lie
And think a life well lost is mine.

"A life well lost"! The phrase is perhaps pathetically revealing--and
prophetic. Or are we stretching the poet's ambitions to be known as a
poet? That he published what he wrote indicates a normal desire for
recognition, yet it can hardly be doubted, either, that he was an
amateur in verse, whose life was rather centred in his contemplative,
retiring existence among the fields and hills of Amherst. There may
even seem to some a delicate Pharisaism about this sonnet, a
Pharisaism removed from the robustness of Thoreau, who would certainly
have argued the point with the farmer:

"That boy," the farmer said, with hazel wand
Pointing him out, half by the haycock hid,
"Though bare sixteen can work at what he's bid
From sun till set, to cradle, reap or band."
I heard the words, but scarce could understand
Whether they claimed a smile or gave me pain;
Or was it aught to me, in that green lane,
That all day yesterday, the briers amid,
He held the plough against the jarring land
Steady, or kept his place among the mowers;
Whilst other fingers, sweeping for the flowers,
Brought from the forest back a crimson stain?
Was it a thorn that touched the flesh? or did
The poke-berry spit purple on my hand?

Yet, as we have said, Tuckerman was far from Pharisaism of any sort,
either of the aesthete or nature-lover. His mind was too genuinely
occupied with spiritual problems. Take, for example, this closing
sonnet in a sequence depicting the discords of Nature:

Not the round natural word, not the deep mind,
The reconcilement holds: the blue abyss
Collects it not; our arrows sink amiss;
And but in Him may we our import find.
The agony to know, the grief, the bliss
Of toil, is vain and vain! clots of the sod
Gathered in heat and haste, and flung behind,
To blind ourselves and others--what but this,
Still grasping dust and sowing toward the wind?
No more thy meaning seek, thine anguish plead;
But leaving straining thought and stammering word
Across the barren azure pass to God;
Shooting the void in silence, like a bird--
A bird that shuts his wings for better speed!

Here, surely, is poetry that would not seem the least among the myriad
hosts in Mr. Stedman's hospitable anthology! The rhyme scheme may be
quite unorthodox, but the poet's lips have