Page:The Cambridge History of American Literature, v3.djvu/67

Gilder 49 drawn into too many things," he wrote in a letter, "is perhaps true." He was right; both his health and his work, in various fields, were impaired. In another letter he refers to his "in- sufficient but irrepressible verse," which describes it well enough. He began verse writing under happy auspices. Milton was his master at the age of ten or twelve, and his father encouraged him to write. Years later, he chanced to meet Helena de Kay at the very time that he came upon Rossetti's translation of the Vita Nuova; the result of the conjunction was the love sonnets of The New Day, his first volume, which was published in 1875. With its slow, heavily-freighted lines, its solemn music and carefully composed imagery, its intense feeling not fully articu- late, its occasional vagueness of meaning, it contrasts with the obvious and more lively American poetry of that day and the day before. The vagueness of meaning Gilder happily es- caped in his later work; the other qualities he retained and improved. Of virtually all of his poetry, the dominant trait is a brood- ing intensity, — suggested by the dark, peering eyes of the man himself, — expressed in language distilled and richly associative, "the low, melodious pour of musicked words." He was pas- sionately responsive to music, to The deep-souled viola, the 'cello grave. The many-mooded, singing violin. The infinite, triumphing, ivoried clavier — his own poetry has the quality of orchestral instruments, oftenest the grave 'cello. Many of his poems are concerned with other arts, especially painting and acting, for art was to this "stickler for form," as he called himself, a large part of life. He naturally wrote on Modjeska, Eleonora Duse, A Monument of Saint-Gaudens, An Hour in a Studio, and In Praise of Por- traiture as well as on MacDowell, The Pathetic Symphony, A Fantasy of Chopin, Paderewski, and Beethoven. He had, too, a love of the Orient, — an artist's love as well as a reflective poet's, — that led him to add In Palestine, and Other Poems (1898) to New York's considerable body of literature on the East. Yet art was by no means a tower of ivory to this public man. VOL. Ill — 4