These paintings are like miniatures which must submit to scrutiny under the reading glass. In this connection his craftsmanship becomes interesting in the history of versification. For Gilder was at once a master of the more complex forms of traditional verse and an early experimenter in the free, rhythmic forms which are the subject of spirited controversy to-day. Some rhythmic prose appears in his earliest volume, but the sonnet prevails at the beginning of his authorship, and at the end it almost utterly disappears in favor of the freest sort of blank verse, irregular and unrimed iambic measures, poems which are suggestive of but distinct from Whitman's, and frank prose-poetry, not even "shredded prose"--in the language of Mr. Howells--but printed in solid paragraphs. Except for the sonnet, Gilder had no favorite measure or stanza in his earlier volumes. Few poems are in exactly similar measures. There are lines of from three to seven feet, quatrains of various sorts, and rhythms from that of the heroic couplet to that of the so-called Pindaric ode. But whatever the measure he adopted, he was scrupulously consistent to it, though he employed it easily, seldom conceding an awkward or prosaic locution to the exigencies of lilt or rime. So he seems to have been equally at home in the use of sundry forms--in the antiphonal ballad like "The Voyager," within the pale of "The Sonnet," in the anapæstic flow of "A Song of Early Autumn," in the swift-moving iambics of "A Woman's Thought," with its intricate double and triple rimes, or in the psalmlike sibilations of "The Whisperers." The philosophy of Gilder was the philosophy of his most enlightened contemporaries. There is in it much of Emerson, whom he called the "shining soul" of the New World, and there is much of Whitman, though it is not clear whether their likeness does not lie in their common accord with Emerson rather than in a direct influence from "the good gray poet" to Gilder. The immanence of God in nature and in the heart of man (see "The Voice of the Pine"); the unity of all natural law (see "Destiny"); the conflict between religion and theology (see "Credo"); and a faith in the essentials of democratic life,--these are the wholesome fundamentals of modern thinking shared alike by Emerson and Whitman and Gilder. Gilder is not their most impressive or prophetic expositor. He is a lesser voice in the choir. The point of real distinction for him is that he combined so finely the discriminating work of a literary editor with the unwearying life of a good and courageous citizen and still kept the current of his song serene and clear. BOOK LIST =_Individual Authors_=