Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/66

48 Later Poets Philadelphians already mentioned, George H. Boker (1823-90) ' and Thomas B. Read (1822-72), ^ may be named here again on account of their association with writers of the New York group. Boker, distinguished as a dramatist, began authorship with The Lesson of Life, and Other Poems in 1847 and continued to write verse. Read's first volume appeared in Philadelphia in the same year. Among his poems are The New Pastoral (1855), a long poem dealing with American pioneer life. The Wagoner of the Alleghanies (1862), a tale of the Revolutionary War, and many short lyrics, of which the best known is Sheri- dan's Ride. Although Richard Watson Gilder (1844-1909) belongs to the same general group with Taylor, Stoddard, and the other "squires of poesy, " as they called themselves a trifle ostenta- tiously, he. is associated with a later and more public-spirited period of New York culture. Bom at Bordentown, New Jersey, he was educated at his father's schools, first at Bordentown, then at Flushing. The latter school failing, his father re-entered the active ministry shortly before the Civil War. In the war, the father served as chaplain till his death in 1864; a son served in a Zouave regi- ment; and Richard, a boy of nineteen, enlisted in Landis's Philadelphia Battery when the Confederate invasion threat- ened eastern Pennsylvania. The war over, Richard Watson Gilder became a journalist in Newark, soon after in New York, where, in 1870, he became the assistant editor of the new periodical known as Scribner's Monthly. When his chief. Dr. J. G. Holland, died in 1881, Gilder assumed control of the Century, as it was now called, giving it unsparingly his best energy for more than a quarter of a century. Partly through his own interests, partly through his wife's (Helena de Kay's) association with fellow painters, he found himself surrounded by friends of a type very different from those of the Bohe- mians and squires of poesy — La Parge, Saint-Gaudens, Stanford White, Joseph Jefferson, Madame Modjeska, and, in the summers on Cape Cod, President Cleveland. Again, unlike the earlier members of the New York group, he became an ardent and enhghtened humanitarian and publicist, serving the cause of good government in city and nation. "That I am ' See Book II, Chap. ii. " See Book III, Chap. 11.