His regard for nature was refined and sophisticated. One passes from the exquisite "Dawn" with which his first volume opened, past "Thistle-Down" and "The Violet" to the poems of Tyringham, his summer home; and then to "Home Acres" and "The Old Place," which had no rival; and ends "In Helena's Garden" between "The Marble Pool" and "The Sundial," to drink tea with eleven pretty girls at a round table made from a granite millstone. The sun shines brightly, the flowers are in bloom, their odor mingling with that of the souchong, the conversation is facile, and everybody is amiable and complacent. From such a catalogue one might expect sappy and emasculated nature poems, but once again Gilder's sanity rescues him. Even in Helena's garden he is rather a strong man at ease than a sybarite. In his enjoyment of the allied arts his taste was generous. Music appealed to him most of all. He chanted the praises of Handel and Chopin, Rubinstein and Tschaikowsky, but of Beethoven still more, and of Wagner most of all. He told of the thrill he caught from the various instruments, but of the deeper thrill from the singer and from the chorus. The art of "Madame Butterfly" appealed to him, but not so deeply as the power of the drama, even if played "In a little theater, in the Jewry of the New World." Naturally he wrote much of his own art, revealing his high seriousness in his poems about the poet. Poetry was not solely the record or the evidence of beauty for him. Although his only markedly personal allegiance in poetry was an allegiance to Keats, it was a fealty to Keats taken off before his prime. Gilder lamented the wrong fate had done the youthful genius and did not content himself with reiterating that "a thing of beauty is a joy forever." For Gilder never, even in his most ecstatic moods, indulged in the fallacy of setting art above life. Though his work does not show the marked changes which have developed in many evolving careers, there is a clear emergence of philosophic and then social and civic interest in his progressive volumes. His sense for the need of a brave integrity comes to the surface in such poems as "Reform," "The Prisoner's Thought," "The Heroic Age," "The Demagogue," "The Tool," "The New Politician," "The Whisperers," and "In Times of Peace." To such themes as these and to his poems of heroism and of the reunited country Gilder brought the same delicacy of touch as to his poems of love and art and nature, and he brought into view in them the latent vigor which saved the others from being merely pink and mellifluous. In poetry written on the scale of Gilder's there is need of finest workmanship. There is no chance for Turneresque effects: The foreground golden dirt, The sunshine painted with a squirt.