been touched by a coal from
the high altar, none the less.

The volume closes with a sonnet sequence which is poignantly intimate;
almost it is a diary of the poet's grief for the loss of the woman he
loved, and in its stabbing intensity holds a hint of such poems as
Patmore's _The Azalea_. Here is one:

Again, again, ye part in stormy grief
From these bare hills and bowers so built in vain,
And lips and hearts that will not move again--
Pathetic Autumn and the writhled leaf;
Dropping away in tears with warning brief:
The wind reiterates a wailful strain,
And on the skylight beats the restless rain,
And vapour drowns the mountain, base and brow.
I watch the wet black roofs through mist defined,
I watch the raindrops strung along the blind,
And my heart bleeds, and all my senses bow
In grief; as one mild face, with suffering lined,
Comes up in thought: oh, wildly, rain and wind,
Mourn on! she sleeps, nor heeds your angry sorrow now.

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 cr