BY JOHN COLEMAN ADAMS

Frontispiece

William Hamilton Gibson, Age 41

(The autograph was always written without lifting the pen, beginning with the last half of the “H” and ending with the first half)]

William Hamilton Gibson
Artist—Naturalist—Author

By
John Coleman Adams
Author of “Nature Studies in Berkshire,” etc.
Illustrated

G. P. Putnam’s Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1901
Copyright, 1901
BY
G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
Dedicated
to
Emma L. B. Gibson
and
Her Sons

THE MOTIVE

THREE men have done more than any others to inspire our generation with the love of nature. They are Henry D. Thoreau, John Burroughs, and William Hamilton Gibson. Thoreau, when the generation was young, challenged it to come out of doors, live in a shanty, and see as much of the world as he saw. John Burroughs, in later years, has acted as guide to a multitude of minds, eager to be “personally conducted” to field and forest. William Hamilton Gibson, besides winning many feet into those “highways and byways” whose charms he taught us to feel, was fortunate in his exceptional power to bring nature to the very eyes of men in the works of his pencil, with which he made luminous—literally “illustrated”—his pages. This alone would be a justification of some account of his life and work.

But in addition to this claim on the interest of the public, those who knew him are aware of others;—a personality of singular charm and forcefulness; a career quite marvelous in its swift and sure achievements; a genius as rare as it was versatile; a devotion to art and to study which fairly wore him out in its exactions on his energy; an ideal which instructs while it shames our sordidness and materialism. His personality will surely grow upon the American people as time gives a true perspective to his life and work. Already we can see something of his conspicuousness and his right to a place in the foremost group of our nature-prophets. In that great trio, Thoreau is the philosopher, Burroughs the poet and man of letters, Gibson the artist-naturalist. In these days when so many are entering into the inheritance which Gibson helped to secure, it is fitting that nature-lovers should hear the story of his fruitful life.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

[*] From a drawing by William Hamilton Gibson

WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBBON

CHAPTER I
A FORTUNATE BOYHOOD

TO be well-born is half of the battle of life; and to have an environment which helps the life of the child and the youth is a good fraction of the other half. So that the man whose parentage and whose education are good is fortunate above his fellows, and well-assured of a successful issue to his life. Heredity and early environment—these are what the scientists call them—are as the building and the rigging of the ship. The best sailing-master can do little with an ill-built, ill-rigged vessel. There is much in the stock from which William Hamilton Gibson came, much in his education and early association, which explains his life and the way in which he lived it. He was born in Sandy Hook, Newtown, Connecticut, in a region where the lower Berkshire mountain-ranges break into irregular and crowded hills, green, picturesque, and restful. He has himself left a charming description of the old home and its immediate surroundings, in the chapter called “Summer” in “Pastoral Days.”

“Hometown (Sandy Hook), owing to some early faction, is divided into two sections, forming two distinct towns. One Newborough (Newtown), a hilltop hamlet, with its picturesque long street, a hundred feet in width, and shaded with great weeping elms that almost meet overhead; and the other, Hometown proper (Sandy Hook), a picturesque little village in the valley, cuddling close around the foot of a precipitous bluff, known as Mt. Pisgah. A mile’s distance separates the two centers. The old homestead is situated in the heart of Hometown, fronting on the main street. The house itself is a series of after-thoughts, wing after wing, gable after gable having clustered around the old nucleus as the growth of new generations necessitated new accommodation. Its outward aspect is rather modern, but the interior with its broad open fireplace and accessories in the shape of crane and firedogs, is rich with all the features of typical New England; and the two gables of the main roof enclose the dearest old garret imaginable.... Looking through the dingy window between the maple-boughs, my eye extends over lawns and shrubberies three acres in extent,—a little park, overrun with paths in every direction, through ancient orchard and embowered dells, while far beyond are glimpses of the wooded knolls, the winding brook, and meadows dotted with waving willows, and farther still, the undulating farm.”

In such a spot Gibson was born October the fifth, 1850. His father was originally a Boston man, who finally removed to Brooklyn, though maintaining the home in the country, at Newtown.

The Gibson ancestry is one of no little interest, embracing as it does, in various branches, some of the most distinguished names in Eastern Massachusetts. The first American bearer of the name was John Gibson of Cambridge, whose coming to this country was at least as early as 1634, and who died in Cambridge in 1694 at the age of ninety-three years. His descendants remained for the most part in Massachusetts for several generations. Thomas Gibson of Townsend, Massachusetts, the grandfather of William Hamilton, by marriage with Frances Maria Hastings brought into the family line the famous Dana family, a connection of which his descendants were justly proud. The original Dana ancestor was also a Cambridge settler, Richard by name, who married Anne Bullard. His grandson, by his son Daniel (who married Naomi Crosswell), was Mr. Justice Richard Dana, whose death in 1772 deprived the patriots of those stormy days of one of their foremost and ablest leaders. Justice Dana was unquestionably at the head of the Massachusetts bar, an authority on the precedents in American cases more quoted by Story than any other pleader of his time. He is one of the figures in Hawthorne’s sketch, given in his “Grandfather’s Chair,” of the episode in the drama of pre-Revolutionary agitation, when Andrew Oliver made oath to take no measures to enforce the Stamp Act. One of his brothers was Francis Dana, Chief Justice of Massachusetts, and ambassador to Russia, whose wife was Elizabeth Ellery, and whose son Richard Henry left a name always honorable in the history of American letters. Richard Dana’s daughter Lydia married John Hastings, a descendant of both the famous John Cottons of Boston renown. Their daughter Frances M., married to Thomas Gibson, was the mother of Edmund Trowbridge Hastings Gibson, and grandmother of William Hamilton Gibson. It is no wonder that the latter should write to an inquiring friend:

“You ask whether I am a New Englander. Let me set your heart at rest by telling you that I am a way-back Puritan. The race has been petering out from old John Cotton down through a long list of historical men whom I am glad to own as ancestors. (I don’t count some of the earlier Lords and Ladies to whom I trace my lineage—they are a pretty bad lot to my thinking.) I honor the humble names of several of my progenitors who lived and died in the love and respect of their fellow men, and have some reason to feel a little pride in being able to allude to Justice Richard Dana, of Massachusetts, as my great-great-grandfather, and a lineage which embraces the names of Washington Allston, Ellery Channing, and others equally noble and worthy; and now it has come down to me in this branch of the family. Yes, I am New England to the core. No other place on earth will ever be so near and dear or carry me to loftier mountain tops.”

From the old country home and its surroundings the lad of ten years went to a school which was probably as well-adapted to his temper and tastes as any which could have been selected. At any rate it was a school to which he became profoundly attached, and whose master he was to count among the dearest and closest friends of a lifetime. The “Gunn School,” or the “Gunnery,” as it came to be called, was one of the famous institutions of this country, a school which left its indelible mark upon many a boy whose maturity was to be eminent and useful in the national life. It was a school unique in its theory and without rivals in its practice. Its founder and head was Frederick W. Gunn, a native of Washington, Connecticut, where he spent his life, did his great and good work, and died in a ripe old age. He was a man of rare character and gifts. Large-hearted and large-minded, with a religious and ethical nature of the most positive kind, he was a man predestined to influence others, and mold the lives of youth. Though he was an “abolitionist” in days when that term carried with it intensest odium and social proscription, and a dissenter from conventional orthodoxy in a time when to differ from established standards was to write one’s self down an “infidel,” he was a successful teacher, and made and maintained a series of schools, which finally grew into the noble “Gunnery,” a term at first used by the boys facetiously, but so apt and so happy as to be officially adopted as the title of the school. One of his old pupils, writing of the character of the institution, says:

“When Mr. Gunn called the school which his genius had established ‘a home for boys’ he stated the simple and exact truth.... Mr. and Mrs. Gunn both had the parental instinct so strong that they really took to their hearts each individual boy, and brooded over him as if he were their own flesh and blood.”

This home-school and school-home in one was conducted as a miniature republic; its aim was all-round, symmetrical character; its method grew out of the hearty, wholesome, honest, and loving nature of its head; its spirit was justice and love. Perhaps it was not a school where “marks” counted for a great deal; and the drill in books may not have been as severe and systematic as in some institutions. But the boy who went to the “Gunnery” was pretty sure to imbibe some notions of honor, justice, kindliness, and obedience which he never forgot. As one of the old pupils writes:

“We recall an era of uncurbed freedom in a spot

The Gunnery

Washington, Connecticut

hallowed by home affections without home effeminacies; where every bad trait of a boy was systematically assailed and every good trait strengthened, so far as might be, so as to take its final place in an enduring character and robust manhood.”

Gibson himself has given a tender and vivid picture of the school which played so large a part in his life, in the pages of “Pastoral Days”:

“How lightly did I appreciate the fortunate journey when, twenty summers ago, I followed this road for the first time, when a boy of ten years, on my way to an unknown village, I looked across the landscape to the little spires on that distant hill! Little did I dream of the six years of unmixed happiness and precious experience that awaited me in that little Judea! I only knew that I was sadly quitting a happy home on my way to ‘boarding-school’—a school called the Snuggery, taught by a Mr. Snug, in a little village named Snug Hamlet, about twenty miles from Hometown.

“There are some experiences in the life of every one which, however truthful, cannot be told but to elicit the doubtful nod or the warning finger of incredulity. They were such experiences as these, however, that made up the sum of my early life in that happy refuge called in modern parlance a ‘boarding-school’—a name as empty, a word as weak and tame in its significance, as poverty itself; no doubt abundantly expressive in its ordinary application, but here it is a mockery and a satire. This is not a ‘boarding-school’; it is a household, whose memories moisten the eye and stir the soul; to which its scattered members through the fleeting years look back as to a neglected home, with father and mother dear, whom they long once more to meet as in the tenderness of boyhood days; a cherished remembrance which, like the ‘house upon a hill, cannot be hid,’ but sends abroad its light unto many hearts who in those early days sought the loving shelter; a bright star in the horizon of the past, a glow that ne’er grows dim, but only kindles and brightens with the flood of years. Yes, yes; I know it sounds like a dash of sentiment, but words of mine are feeble and impotent indeed when sought for the expression of an attachment so fond, of a love so deep.”

Most delightfully, too, does he blend an account, in the same chapter, of a return to the old school, in later years, and a picture of the characteristic life of that school as it lies in the memories of many successive generations of boys who passed through its scenes:

“It is eight o’clock, and the Snuggery is hushed in the quiet of the study hour, and as we look through the windows we see the little groups of studious lads bending over their books. Turning a corner on the piazza, we are confronted with a tall hexagonal structure at its farther end. This is the Tower, the lower room of which is consecrated to the cozy retirement of Mr. and Mrs. Snug. The door leading to the porch is open, and, as if awakening from a nap in which the past fifteen years have been a dream, I listen to the same dear voice. I approach nearer. Under the glow of a student’s lamp I look upon the beloved face, the flowing hair and beard now silvered with the lapse of years—a face of unusual firmness, but whose every line marks the expression of a tender, loving nature, and of a large and noble heart. Near him another sits—a helpmeet kind and true, cherished companion in a happy, useful life. Into her lap a nestling lad has climbed; and as she strokes the curly head and looks into the chubby face, I see the same expression as of old, the same motherly tenderness and love beaming from the large gray eyes.

“Mr. Snug is leaning back in his easy-chair, and two boys are standing up before him; one of them is speaking, evidently in answer to a question.

‘I called him a galoot, sir.’

‘You called George a galoot, and then he threw the base-ball club at you—is that it?’

‘Yes, sir,’ interrupted George; ‘but I was only playing, sir.’

‘Yes,’ resumed the voice of Mr. Snug, ‘but that club went with considerable force, and landed over the fence, and made havoc in Deacon Farish’s onion-bed; and that reminds me that the deacon’s onion-bed is overrun with weeds. Now, Willie,’ continued Mr. Snug, after a moment’s hesitation, with eyes closed, and head thrown back against the chair, ‘Saturday morning—to-morrow, that is—directly after breakfast, you go out into the grove and call names to the big rock for half an hour. Don’t stop to take breath; and don’t call the same name twice. Your vocabulary will easily stand the drain. You understand?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And, George,’ continued Mr. Snug, with deliberate, easy intonation, ‘to-morrow morning, at the same time, you present yourself politely to Deacon Farish, tell him that I sent you, and ask him to escort you to his onion-bed. After which you will go carefully to work and pull out all the weeds. You understand, sir?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And then you will both report to me as usual.’ And with a pleasant smile, which was reflected in both their faces, the erring youngsters were dismissed. Before the door has closed behind them we are standing in the doorway. Here I draw the curtain; for who but one of its own household could understand a welcome at the Snuggery?”

No feature of the “Gunnery” life is more interesting to the old scholar or to outsiders than the ingenious and effective punishments invented by Mr. Gunn for the less serious and still important offenses inevitable in such a community. He made early application of the principles so earnestly defended in Herbert Spencer’s “Education” and contrived to “make the punishment fit the crime” in a manner worthy of W. S. Gilbert’s famous “Mikado.” His memorialist, enlarging on this phase of the “Gunnery” life, thus enumerates “the grotesque punishments which Mr. Gunn visited on petty offenses in his school and family”:

“A boy of uncommon diffidence might be sent to call on some village spinster or, worse yet for the blushing youngster, on some comely village lass. A youth too boisterous would be dismissed for a four-mile walk, ordered to hold a chip in his mouth for an hour, or to run a dozen times around the church on the Green, sounding the tin dinner-horn at each corner in rotation. Two small boys caught fighting were often ordered to sit, one in the other’s lap, taking turns thus for an hour or two. Pounding a log with a heavy club was a favorite panacea for superfluous energy in the family sitting-room. Once a mischievous youngster was seen sprinkling a dog’s face with water at the tank behind the Gunnery. The master, who had a tender spot in his heart for animals, stole up behind the offender and ducked him liberally, to give him, as he said afterward, an inkling of the feelings of the dog. At the Gunnery it used to be a custom to allow a boy to take the anniversary of his birth as a holiday, and a too clever lad was detected by Mr. Gunn celebrating thus his third birthday within a single year. The next genuine anniversary of the boy’s birth came on a Saturday, which the recusant celebrated by hugging a tree for several hours while his schoolmates enjoyed the regular school holiday. A resident of Washington tells how, years ago, he found at the fork of two roads and hugging a sign-post in anything but sentimental fashion a youth whose only reply to questions was, ‘I’m a poor miserable sinner,’ that being the formula of penance which the master had prescribed. A dozen lads some twenty years ago were caught raiding the bough-apple trees of the neighbors. Mr. Gunn made them draw up a formal address of apology, bear it in procession to each of the amazed owners of the trees, read it on their knees, and pray forgiveness. A single truant once caught committing the same offense in the orchard of a poor widow was sent to work all day picking up stones in one of her fields.

“Actual wickedness was severely punished by Mr. Gunn, sometimes in the good, old-fashioned way; but his motive in inflicting for minor faults the odd penalties here alluded to seemed to be to take cognizance of the error in a manner that would sufficiently incommode the culprit without hurting his self-respect or leaving an angry smart. The boy appreciated the fact that ‘he stood corrected’; but he also appreciated the humorous side of the penalty. Those who revisited Washington after leaving school sought no familiar haunt with more interest than the shrines to which they had made penitential pilgrimages under orders—Kirby Corners, a gentle jog around the square; the old sawmill in the hollow, which, visited at night, was weird and ghostly enough to sober the wildest urchin; Moody Barn, as redolent of pleasant memories as of new-mown hay; and, for more serious faults, distant ‘Judd’s Bridge.’

. . . . . .

“He insisted on neatness and order, and often a family meeting was called and made a court of inquiry over a bit of paper found on the lawn, or a peanut-shuck on the stairs. Once there was a question as to the history of several pieces of orange-peel in the grass in front of the house. The forty boys were summoned and made to stand in a row on the long piazza. Mr. Gunn called upon each one to state what he knew about the orange-peel, and at the end of the investigation he formed the dozen or more culprits into file, the tallest at the head, and made them march in solemn procession about the yard until they had picked up all the offending scraps, and then to the pig-sty to deposit them in their proper place.”

There is a delightful paragraph in a letter which Gibson wrote home to his brothers, in which he tells in a boy’s quaint way of one of these ingenious penalties which was visited on himself.

“One day I and two other boys eat some walnuts in church in the meeting time. Mr. Gunn found it out. He made us three boys take the rest of our walnuts up to the minister. We did so and the minister gave us his thanks for the walnuts, and asked us if we would not have some supper, for it was supper time. We refused and left. He told us not to eat any more.”

But Mr. Gunn could administer as sharp reprimands to parents and older folk as he could to the boys who were his pupils. There is a plaintive letter from Gibson to his father, growing yellow now, with age, in which the heart of the little boy is uncovered, and his longing for letters from home is touchingly revealed. And the fatherly, warm-hearted teacher had evidently read it, and his soul burned within him. So he wrote upon the back page of the little note the following admonitory words, which must have elicited a letter by return mail:

“My Dear Sir: It seems to me if I had such a dear little son as Willie Gibson, sent away from home to a boarding school, and thrown upon the cold charities of the world, so proverbially heartless and selfish as the ministers say it is, I would require one of the clerks to write to him once or twice a quarter. Willie is happy in his present relations, but somewhat anxious about the friends he left behind him. He presumes his parents are well, not having seen their names in the papers, but would feel more sure if he heard from them. Willie is a dear little fellow, just as good as he can be. Should you think it best to write to him, direct care of F. W. Gunn, Washington, Conn.”!

These are words like rifle bullets!

Of course the students of child psychology will be interested to learn whatever is worth knowing concerning the appearance, in embryo, of the man Gibson in the boy of this period. There is satisfaction for such investigators and there is disappointment as well. There are many intimations, at this period, of the man that is to be. There are traces of peculiarities which wholly disappeared with the years. There were aptitudes and tastes appearing in the school-days at the Gunnery, which no reprimands and no discouragements could subdue; and there were shortcomings and faults which the years were destined utterly to efface. It certainly seems strange to find Mr. Gunn writing to the boy’s mother, “Willie has not yet learned to be spontaneously industrious. I know he will come to it. He improves”; and again to his father, “Willie insists that he is getting along finely in his studies, that he studies very hard, and is doing well. But you must accept this with some grains of allowance for a boy’s favorable judgment of himself. He does not learn as fast as I wish to have him. I think his tendency to take on fat hinders his power of industrious, persevering application; he is getting to be quite a big fellow, and I urge him a good deal.” When one remembers that the most marked of all his traits as a man was the fierce and enthusiastic zeal with which he worked, consuming the powers of a robust physique in his zest for toil, one is moved to be very patient with the unpromising side of a child’s nature. It may take a great while to become “spontaneously industrious”; but Gibson’s experience shows how needless it is to be despondent because a boy does not work with a man’s spirit. Sufficient unto the age are the traits thereof.

But in other ways, the schoolboy was forecasting the traits of the mature man. There is a mournful letter preserved out of these years, in which the little fellow writes his father after receiving a reprimand for illustrating his letters with pen-and-ink pictures. His inborn faculty would exhibit itself, and the home letters were filled with funny and interesting sketches. But that did not seem to the parental mind a wise use of writing materials. So the embryo artist was warned to curb his passion for illustration. He wrote a few penitent lines in response. “Next comes about the writing. I own that I am very foolish in putting those pictures in my letters, and I won’t do it any more. I never put them in only to the letters home.” Vain promise! It was one more attempt to drive out nature with a pitchfork; and was as unsuccessful—as it deserved to be. The artist-impulse was straining and struggling within him already and was bound to assert itself more and more vigorously till it should triumph in his life-work.

So, too, there appeared in these early days the passionate love of nature which was to be a controlling element in his later years. Botany was one of the studies which he insisted upon taking up under Mr. Gunn’s teaching. There was a little family controversy over the matter, growing out of the mother’s fear that the really practical things would be neglected in this passion for nature-study. It sounds strange enough, at this distance in time, with all the light of the boy’s later life, to read the mother’s anxious words:

“We wish [Mr. Gunn] to judge and direct in all these things, but I was afraid your own wish and the way I spoke to you about the delight of studying Botany, might have led you to speak so positively in choosing it, that he would suppose it was by our direction. If you really do take up Botany you must expect to find that it is not all play either. There are hard things to remember, and you must make up your mind to work at them bravely and perseveringly if you are determined to make them yours.”

A little sentence later in the same letter shows the bent of the boy. His mother, referring to a recent visit of his father to the school, remarks:

“I was afraid when your father told me how he found you in the calamus swamp, that you would be sick.”

That tells an interesting story of boyish passion for plants. And so do the little fellow’s letters home. Very early in his life at the Gunnery he wrote to his father:

“I get along in my studies in Botany very well indeed, and he has described two or three plants, one of which was Marsh-marigold or the Cowslip. He has analyzed the cherry blossom”; and Mr. Gunn wrote a footnote to the same letter saying: “He seems delighted with Botany and makes close observations.” This quality of his mind, cropping out in its earliest essays, appears again and again in these juvenile letters. They are well worth quoting, as early witnesses to the attentive eye, the retentive memory, the descriptive power which were part of his natural and congenital outfit for his life-work. One of them divides its pages between art and natural history:

“My paints have given me a great deal of fun. I bought a blank book and copied several pictures in it out of my ‘Harris’s Insects,’ and I also painted them, some from the description and some from the plates. I have one page of beetles, another page of butterflies, etc., etc. I guess when I get it done it will be ‘betterish nische.’ Everybody comes to me lately to have

William Hamilton Gibson

Age, 13

me draw and paint them a valentine, which of course I do for some of them. I wish that in your next letter you would send me a couple of paint brushes, for the hairs of mine keep coming out all the while.

“That same feeling has come over me that I used to have last summer when I was after bugs and butterflies. The other day, it came very strong and I went out to look for cocoons, and I looked and looked, but saw nothing, and gave it up entirely, but as I was coming on my way into the house I saw some small pear-trees and I thought that I would look on them and I did, and saw a bunch of leaves. I looked and saw there was a Cecropia cocoon done up in them which made me feel like an eagle darting at her prey. I grabbed the prize and kept it and have got it yet. We have got a new minister which I told you about. I showed it to him and he told me to call and see him and bring it to him and he then asked me if any boy had a microscope. I told him yes (for Commodore has got a Craig’s Microscope) and the next evening Commodore and I took my ‘Harris’s Insects’ and showed it to him. He was much pleased with it and is going to get one. We did not make a very long call, but it was a nice one.”

Another letter to his mother enlists her help in his entomological interests:

“I have just found an Imperial moth worm on a maple-tree. Will you please look on one of the small apple-trees in the orchard near the place where the arbor used to be, and on that row of small apple-trees, there is a tree on which I put a Cecropia worm for myself, which may be found by its effects under the tree. I think a great deal of it or I wouldn’t write about it. Have you found any worms yet? I wish that I was there to look about for them, or I wish that there was somebody there who would look after them for me, for it is such a splendid place for them. The boys are leaving from here, very fast, and we all will leave in 13 days more....

“P. S. That worm that I told you about on the apple-tree, if very large, must be taken off and put into a box with fresh apple leaves every day; if small, do the same.”

A letter which he wrote in 1865 bears witness to the trait which his teacher had already noted—his careful observation. He made pen-and-ink drawings to make clear what flower he was trying to identify, which was plainly the false foxglove.

“I have been out in several places and have stuck in as much as ten stakes in different places where those beautiful scarlet or crimson lilies grow and when the stalk has gone I will take them up. Saturday I intend to go out in search of some more. There are plenty of them, and sometimes I see them two or three on one stalk.

“Do you know what the large trumpet-creeper is that has very large flowers of a red color? One used to grow at the east end of the back piazza up against the side of the house. Well, there is a flower of the same shape and kind of a beautiful yellow color, but it grows like a primrose; on one stalk there are over 20 flowers of about an inch and a half in length. The tops of the buds seem to be lapped over each other, and when there are blossoms they look very pretty. I am going to try and get it for you, but I don’t know whether it has seed or not. I suppose not. Nevertheless, I’ll try and get it for you, for it is very pretty.

“In a garden up here there is a kind of ‘Columbine,’ very large, of two kinds, purple and white and very large. I am welcome to all the seed that I want. I don’t know whether you want any or not, but nevertheless I’ll get you a lot.

“Here I must stop. I remain

“Your aff. son Willie.”

The boy was fortunate in his mother, whose fine nature, trained tastes, and Christian spirit moved and moulded the best there was in him. Her letters to the little pupil are models of maternal sympathy, and reflect very vividly the boy’s strong passion for living things and the study of them. One of her characteristic messages went to him in 1862, and reveals her own interest in the pursuits which were delighting her children and which were destined to mean so much to the boy she was writing to:

“How are your friends and dear companions, the worms? I missed them very much after you had gone, and often found myself stepping carefully and looking down to the right and the left in crossing the upper hall, expecting to see some green or brown thing crawling about. The great drawer I gave you, we call ‘the worm drawer’ yet, and I don’t know as I shall ever open it comfortably again. The peaceable and innocent rolls of linen and sewing lie in it now, just as they used before you had it, but sometimes I forget and open the one under it cautiously, expecting to see some of your treasures dropped through again, on my things. Henry and Julie are making collections now also, and Cottie brought home, the other day, the finest, largest specimen I ever saw, of the sort you called ‘Polyphemus’? It was of immense size, and a very bright healthy color, both in its body and in those little tufts that stud it all over. He laid it away very carefully, and left it in peace a few days, and yesterday, behold it had spun a cocoon in its box as large as a butternut, and as strong as linen, of a beautiful reddish brown. We shall expect the moth with great interest. The children are too impatient to hurry up business with their worms. They are forever opening the boxes, and lifting and handling the creatures, so that I should think the poor things would despair of ever getting a chance to set their houses in order, at all.”

His relations with his mother were always close and sympathetic. She was a rare nature, refined and cultivated, with a strong literary bent and deep religious feeling. She wrote not a little, contributing to the pages of “The Christian Union” and other publications. She scrupulously kept all the boy’s letters from his schooldays forward through the years. One of the cherished mementos of her life was a little manuscript volume, which bears the inscription: “I leave this book to my son William.” It is a record of her study of the Bible, her grapple with the great problems of ethical and theological thought, prayers in which she has uttered the aspirations of a reverent spirit insistently seeking light through all the confusion and shadow of modern speculation, comment upon the great books which were stirring Christendom and sounding the note of the new thought about Christ and Christianity. To read them is to discover the sources of the son’s deep reverence and broad, unconventional religious life. It is to feel anew the unconscious power of motherhood in shaping the ductile spirit of childhood, and to be certain that the light of such a spirit was a very pillar of fire to the soul of her son.

CHAPTER II
CALLING AND ELECTION

IT was between the years 1866 and 1868 that the great crisis of young Gibson’s life occurred; and a series of influences and incidents befell, which were decisive in settling the great questions of his life-work and of the spirit in which he would undertake it.

The latter of the two was the first to be decided. It was at this period of his life that the boy experienced one of those changes in disposition, which was like the awakening or the sudden unfolding of the real self, hitherto hidden under apparently opposite traits. While he was at the Gunnery, Gibson had troubled the soul of his teacher, as we have seen, because he had not, as Mr. Gunn put it, “learned to be spontaneously industrious.” But during the years immediately following, while he was yet at the Polytechnic, he “came to himself.” He had been an easy-going boy, rather indolent in habit, or at least deficient in the power of industrious, persevering application. But now he began to show a love of work, to love it for its own sake, to plan it, and to seek it of his own volition. He took a vigorous hold upon his studies at the Polytechnic. He found a new delight, as well as a sustained, deep-seated interest in his drawing. He took up a new pursuit, to which he devoted his spare hours to such good purpose that he mastered it in astonishingly little time, and carried it to a high point of skill. Chancing to see some wax-flowers made by an expert of his time in Brooklyn, he promptly decided that the art was one which he could master. After some essays of his own, he put himself under the instruction of this teacher, who soon told the boy that he could teach him no more. There are some wonderful stories floating down from those days concerning the work he did in this medium, so fine in its imitative perfection as to deceive the very elect. One, in particular, is to the effect that a cluster of blossoms which he had modeled and carried, as a gift, to Mr. Beecher’s home, stood upon a table in a little vase when Mrs. Beecher saw it for the first time. She took up the vase, and, raising it to inhale the fragrance which it promised, had crushed the delicate work before she discovered the illusion. Apocryphal or not, the story shows the impression his work made upon his early admirers.

But the time had come which was to put his earnestness and force to the test. His father’s death in 1868 had made it necessary that he should hasten to choose a career and begin his self-support. Few young men are “called” to any special work in life; fewer still “elect,” of their own free will, the thing they will do because it is the thing they must do, beyond a doubt. And Gibson began by showing himself no different from other youth; he was to discover his distinction later. For no particular reason, save that it was suggested to him by a business friend and adviser of whom he sought counsel, he took up life-insurance, and became an agent for a leading company of his time. It gives one a strange feeling of incongruity to read the little business card, bearing the title of the “Home Life Insurance Company,” announcing “Wm. H. Gibson, General Agent, 103 Fulton Street, Brooklyn,” with “Office hours, 9 to 10.” One thinks of Nathaniel Hawthorne in the custom-house at Salem; of Charles Lamb at his clerk’s desk in East India House; and experiences a deep sense of relief that this new genius had the grace and the strength to escape from an uncongenial pursuit and follow the urgings of his own spirit. The business had no attractions for the boy. He wanted to draw. He was yearning after open fields and wide horizons. There was a craving in his nature which was at once an outcry for a life of self-utterance by the means and methods of art, and a protest against a life spent in what is called, with cool disparagement of other pursuits, “business.” The young man felt that the one career would mean self-expression, with all its joy, its power, its peace; while the other would be a self-repression, continual, galling, paralyzing. He was born to be a student of nature and to tell her story to the men and women who had not his endowment. The hour had come in which he was to decide whether he could heed his call, believe in himself, choose the path which invited him to labors that fitted his nature, and dare all its difficulties for the sake of being true to his own soul. The situation was not new. It is no unusual thing for young men to waver between such rival purposes. But the interest of such a crisis never wanes. It is always a trial of the real stuff and fiber of the individual. It is an experience which the youth must bear alone. But the gain belongs to all men when the decision is made which seals a life to devotion to its own highest ideal.

There is nothing to record the inward struggle of those days, save the quick resolve which he made, and the abrupt turn in his purpose. In the course of his calls to solicit business he chanced upon an acquaintance who was a draughtsman, and found him engaged in drawing upon the block. Gibson watched him a while, and forgot his errand in the sight of this congenial work. As he told a friend, years afterward: “After looking on for a few moments, I decided that I could do such work as well as he. I learned where the blocks could be bought and went off immediately to invest in a quantity of the material. From that moment I abandoned everything else, and set to work at drawing.” This was in truth the Rubicon of his life. In the decision it marks, young Gibson yielded to his own most honorable ambitions. He elected what was probably the harder way, if we count discouragements of one sort and another, the dampening predictions of the critical and experienced, the warnings and dissuasions of his best friends. Even in a financial way, it meant straitened circumstances, hard work for small pay, and years of the most strenuous effort, before he could obtain the recognition which meant a market for his wares. By so much the more must we esteem his courage, his faith in himself, his willingness to pay the high price of toil and patient waiting for the success which came at last.

One hardly does justice to the boldness of the young man’s resolve until he remembers that Gibson was proposing to begin his career as an artist with nothing but his native genius as a warrant of success. He was wholly lacking in training, as later days would understand it. He had studied art in no school. He had received the teaching of no master-artist. All that he could do was what he had worked out for himself. It would seem almost audacious, even reckless, for a young man to rush into the field of illustration with no more preparation either to fit him to do intelligent work or to discover to himself whether he really possessed abilities which would make his venture worth while. Untaught and unpractised, save in the desultory

William Hamilton Gibson

Age, 17

way of a boy’s attempts to express his own ideas with the pencil, he made up his mind that he could and that he would do as good artistic work as anybody. The intrepidity of youth is either ridiculous or it is sublime. Perhaps we must let events decide which it is. In this case the years made Gibson’s daring spirit seem the truest courage. Yet one holds his breath as he thinks of this boy boldly walking into the offices of the Harper Brothers, with his drawings on wood, to offer them for sale.

It is small wonder that they did not find acceptance in this exacting quarter. Gibson, armed with a letter of introduction to the Harpers, had gone to one of the firm, who turned him over to Charles Parsons, the head of the art department. It was arranged that he should have two weeks’ trial, to test his capacity. At the end of that time Mr. Parsons said to him, in substance, “I do not see that you will ever succeed in an artistic career. I advise you to drop it at once, and go into some other pursuit. I do not feel justified in recommending you to go on.” This judgment was as kindly in intention as it was candid in tone. It was the verdict of a cool-headed critic as well as an honest friend. It ought to have put an end to Gibson’s aspirations. It is the joy of all his friends to remember how he met this rebuff. He insisted that he should go on; he knew what he could do, and he meant to show other people. Nothing could deter, nothing could discourage him. “Very well,” said Mr. Parsons, “whatever you do, do your best; and show me your work from time to time.”

So Gibson turned from the doors which afterward opened to him so eagerly, and traveled on in search of appreciation and a market. He found both at the hands of John G. Shea, then of Frank Leslie’s house, who bought his drawings for “The Chimney Corner” and “The Boys’ and Girls’ Weekly.” “I began to pay my way,” said Gibson in a newspaper interview, “as soon as I met him. It was he who first suggested to me that I might furnish text with my drawings; and then I received double pay.” Soon after this he began to furnish botanical drawings for “The American Agriculturist.” His work was so acceptable that he was invited to take a desk in the offices of the publication, and he here became acquainted with J. C. Beard, Jr., with whom he had a life-long friendship. An opportunity occurring to furnish drawings for botanical articles in Appleton’s “Encyclopædia,” Gibson undertook the task; and when this led to a disagreement with the manager of the “Agriculturist,” he and Beard left the paper and took a room by themselves, in John Street. Here the orders began to come in, besides what they were doing for Leslie and Appleton, from various lithographers. The young men led a happy life, full of hard work, good fellowship, ambitious plans. Gibson was absorbed in his pursuits. He shrank from nothing because it was hard or because it was humble. He turned his pencil to whatever would afford him training and whatever would bring him honest returns. He was ready to do all sorts of “odds and ends” of illustration. He had great facility in producing puzzles of every description, especially those depending on illustration. One entire notebook is filled with suggestions for riddles, puzzles, rebuses, anagrams, which he worked out or had in reserve.

The days were full of hope and determination. He had no doubts about his ultimate success. He was a firm believer in himself. And he knew he had found the work he loved and into which he could throw his whole abounding life. It is a fine picture of a brave young fellow facing a difficult career with the buoyant hopes of youth and the confidence of a really strong nature. He was only nineteen when he wrote to the young girl to whom he had already given his heart: “This work perfectly fascinates me. It has always been my choice; it always will be. I shall never be happy if I have to abandon it. I look forward to it with delight and enthusiasm.... I do not allow myself to be too sanguine. I expect difficulties, trials, disappointments. I am willing to work, use all my energy, brave all manner of disappointments if in the end that future which we so often picture to one another can be realized.”

Another letter, a few months later, tells the story of hard work and increasing care, in apology for delay in writing to his mother. It also introduces the matter of one of his largest commissions up to this time, and shows how certainly he was making his way:

“Mother, I think of you just as much as ever, but I am so busy that when evening comes my natural dislike to letter writing is increased tenfold by fatigue. I wish I could give some correct idea of the amount of work that I do, and of how continually I am occupied. I am dreadfully busy, and last week and week before I worked at the office evening after evening until nearly eight, very seldom leaving before seven. You may perhaps form some idea when I tell you that I have got work on hand now (all in a hurry, as fast as I can do it) amounting to over $1,000.00 (one thousand dollars). It is all from Appleton & Co. and $840.00 of it is in one commission. It consists of twelve drawings on stone, each stone measuring nearly four feet by three, and weighing about four hundred pounds. I agreed to do the drawings on each stone for $70.00 which amounts as above. I have commenced and finished one stone satisfactorily, and commenced another to-day. It takes five men to bring the stone to my office and it is the largest size that can be used on a power press. A ‘tremendous job’ people call it, and don’t see ‘how on earth I manage to get at all these things.’ I believe I told you something about it. You remember that I heard of the intention of the Appletons to publish some mammoth botanical charts, and as it was rather in my line I went and saw Mr. Appleton about it. He asked me if I could draw on stone. I told him ‘yes,’ as if I had done it all my life, and gave him my estimate. It was an estimate calculated to pay me well, and I felt sure by previous inquiry that it was as low as he could get it done elsewhere. It resulted as I expected and the entire job was turned over to me.”

The sequel to that story is given in one of his frank, confidential letters to his mother, meant only for her eye, and therefore full of such a self-expression as he would have made to no one else. It answers still further the question as to how he came to get this particular commission in a way which reveals again his boldness and faith in undertaking new and untried work:

“N. Y., Jan. 22, 1872.

“My dear Mother:

“I have stopped short in my work for the purpose of writing a few lines to you, as more time has already elapsed since you last heard from me than I had expected to allow. Everything goes on as smoothly as I could desire; of course there are ripples occasionally but they only tend to make the intervening success and prosperity more serene by contrast.

“I still continue as busy as ever only more so. The stone work is the principal employment, at present, and I have given from the start immense satisfaction. You remember that in my last ‘long letter’ I spoke of commencing on the second stone the following day. Well I did so and finished on the next day after, not spending quite two days on it. That week I realized $170.00 for work which I did all myself. The Appletons were surprised more than I can tell you when I informed them of the completion of the second stone, and would scarcely believe that I had done it myself. When they came to see the proof they were even more pleased than they were with the first. The third stone was then sent to my office on the next Saturday afternoon. Monday morning following it had not a mark on it and before I left for home that very evening it was completely finished, thus making $70 in one day. On the next morning I went up to the Appletons’ and notified Mr. A. that his third stone for the charts was finished and in a playful way that I wished he would please send for it and let me have the next. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘I told them to take it to you last Saturday afternoon.’ ‘Well,’ said I, they did bring me one last Saturday afternoon and that is the one that I have finished and wish you to take away.’ I wish you could have seen the expression of mingled surprise and incredulity which covered his face. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘have you done it yourself?’ ‘Yes,’ I returned, ‘I commenced it and finished it yesterday.’ He received the intelligence rather with hesitation at first and finally as I had expected, took the course of questioning whether there was really $70.00 worth of work on them. He was very coy in his manner of doing it but I saw well enough through it all. He put such questions as these, ‘Well, you are doing them much quicker than you expected aren’t you? There is not quite so much work on them as you expected, is there? You thought at first that there would be a week’s time on each stone you remember?’ You see the style of query he used. To all these I admitted that they had become much more easy for me than I had expected, that I was hurrying them up because I knew that they were in a great hurry for the work. I reminded them that my estimate was the lowest that they could obtain in the city and said if I had the faculty of working fast that I ought to be remunerated for it, etc. ‘But,’ said he, ‘there is quite a wide difference between a week and a day and it seems that you did the last one in a day.’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘so I did, but I will spend a week at them hereafter.’ This made him laugh heartily, and he drew me a check for $70.00 on the spot and told me that he was glad I was doing them so fast and that the firm were more than pleased, thinking my work far ahead of the original, etc. The fourth stone I finished this Monday having commenced it on Saturday last. It has been taken away this morning; the fifth one is now on my desk ready for me to proceed. It is a beautiful surface to draw upon, and I enjoy the work very much. I certainly have the faculty of drawing very fast. Several artists have seen my drawings on the stone and several lithographers also, and they all tell me frankly (after they have been really convinced that I have drawn one in a day or even two days) that there is not another man in the city that could do it and no one that could do it better. The most reasonable time which the Appletons could find elsewhere was a week and this amongst lithographers who had drawn upon stone all their lives. The printers of my lithographic work say that they never printed neater work in their lives and that my drawings all print very brightly.”

It was about these days that he made his first original work, a little composition now treasured and carefully preserved. He wrote about it to his mother:

“Week before last I took to Mr. Bunce a little bit of sunset effect in the form of a sketch which I did in fifteen minutes, in India ink and white. Beard admired it ever so much, and just for fun I took it to Bunce as a sort of specimen of ‘original design.’ To my surprise he admired it so much that he gave me a block, and told me to put it on the wood by all means, for the ‘Journal.’ It is very simple in composition, being drawn in a circle with the foreground

The Road to Hide-and-Seek Town

First Composition, 1873

open. On the right is a hillside with a few tall trees; on the left another slope, more distant. The extreme distance is composed of a village with church-spire, trees, etc., standing out against a brilliant sunset sky which shows through the trees. In the extreme foreground is a traveler, or farmer, wending his way homeward; his figure is almost a silhouette and his shadow is cast upon the road. It is my first attempt at a design. My head is ‘chuck full of them,’ but I cannot get a chance to use them I am so busy.”

Other letters covering this period are full of interest. They show the heart of the young fellow, his frank delight in his own success, and in the approval which his work begins to receive. He was much elated over the success of an engraving he made for the “Aldine”:

“New York, Feb. 2, 1872.

“Dear Mother:

“I have just a few moments’ spare time which I will improve by writing a short letter or note to you.

“Concerning my picture, all the artists of the establishment admired the effect and recognized the ‘excellent copy’ of Inness’ style and handling. They all seem to think that the picture is rather unnatural in its intensity but that the effect is wonderful. Well, it was yesterday that I brought it over. I had cut it out of the paper on which I drew it and pasted it neatly on a large piece of white stiff photograph board. Its appearance was thus greatly improved, as it had a margin of nearly six inches all around it. At noon time I took the sketch down to the ‘Aldine.’ I saw Mr. Sutton, the proprietor. He held the sketch off from him, looked at it through his hand, and pronounced it magnificent. I of course told him that it was a copy. He asked me if he had not met me before. I told him ‘yes’; that one year ago I came to him with my first drawings on wood, and that he did a great deal to encourage me at the time. He remembered me, remembered my little drawings and described both of them to me—told me that I had a tremendous eye for color, and he had noticed it when I first went to him. He said, ‘When you were here a year ago I told you to come to me when you began to do original work, did I not?’ I answered yes and told him a little of my experience since that time. Well we had a nice little talk and it ended in his giving me a large full page block with the order to put it on wood and he said that I must bring him some more sketches. I am to correct Inness’ unfinished style and make a more finished picture than the original is, as a painting. When it is done I will probably receive from 50 to 60 dollars for it.

“I begin it next week and as I cannot give Roberts’ time to it and will have to work evenings, will probably not finish it for two weeks or so.”

In the fall of this year he had a commission from the Appletons to visit Rhode Island on a sketching tour. It was his first attempt at anything of just this sort, and he was evidently nervous over his responsibilities. But his unfailing courage served him once more, and his naïve account of the trip and of the reception of its fruits is preserved in a letter to his mother:

“Brooklyn, N. Y., Sept. 23/72.

“My dear Mother:

“I returned from my trip on Thursday, but did not wish to write you immediately as I hoped to be able to send you more encouraging news by waiting a day or so. Many were the disadvantages which I labored under during all the time while I was away, being almost sick constantly. Nevertheless I worked through it all, hard and faithfully, and the result is ‘a perfect success,’ far exceeding my greatest anticipations. It was a very important period in my business career, and I felt the necessity of working hard, and, truth to say, I was confident of success, but not to any such degree as that with which I have met.

“My commission included Providence and Suburbs: Pawtucket; Providence Bay; Narragansett Bay; Rocky Point and Narragansett Pier, all of which I visited and sketched. During the first week I remained at the Central Hotel, Providence, where I had quite a pleasant room. It being the first time of my being sent upon work of this kind I was ignorant as to what would be expected of me and of course was much worried and anxious, and the one thing which troubled me most has been the one of all others which has made me so successful. Each day, (with my camp seat, umbrella and materials,) I would start out either on foot or in the cars, traveling nearly until evening and in no case did I bring home with me more than three sketches, and this number only once. It was this scarcity in my number of sketches that caused me to worry, but I still felt that what I had got were good; all through the day would I pass by little bits of landscape that I thought would compose rather prettily, but nevertheless I made up my mind (as I was not to be gone long) to sketch only such bits as I knew would be particularly attractive, and of course it would take nearly the whole day before I could find and sketch more than two. I imagined that this was a very small number, but did not see how I could do much better, as it took a great deal of time to walk about and select the prettiest views. Well, I worked on in this way for the whole week, and at the end of it I never realized more happily the fact that ‘seven times two made fourteen’ and I thought that if I could go home with twenty-eight sketches it would be certainly well enough as far as the number was concerned. But, again I was very much in doubt as to the merit of my sketches and as the other cause of anxiety was now partially removed, this took its place and troubled me. The next circumstance took the spirits right out of me and made me about sick. It commenced to rain and kept it up constantly until I left, and it was the meanest, wetest, rain that I ever knew of, and when it didn’t actually rain it ‘fogged’ and drizzled which was nastier yet. The blank sheet of my drawing paper would have been the best sketch of landscape during those days, as I could see scarcely more than this would represent. Even in the rain I went out and made a few sketches of places already decided upon and finally left Providence in disgust, on my way home down Narragansett Bay. I stopped over night at Rocky Point where I made two sketches, leaving for Newport on the following day (Tuesday). On Wednesday I went to Narragansett Pier when I also made two or three sketches, thence homeward.

“I came home with about twenty-two sketches. All here at the house thought them beautiful. Mr. Beard was perfectly surprised at their beauty and Mr. Bunce at Appleton’s pronounced them one of the ‘best lots of sketches he has yet had’ and complimented me on my ‘perfect success.’ He was very much pleased indeed, and admired them all, and gave vent to his admiration with loud praise; he called old and young Appleton and several other gentlemen to see them, all of whom pronounced them ‘very fine.’ I expected then that he would look them over and select about five of the prettiest for me to put on the wood. This was the most that I thought he would select. Mr. Beard, when I asked him, said that he thought they would select about five, as in other cases they had only taken about that number out of an equivalent stock of sketches. Judge of my complete surprise to see him select and count fifteen of them saying that he would have them all drawn for the ‘Picturesque America.’ This left only about six of the lot which he did not want, and he complimented me on the choice of my selections, saying ‘Generally a lot of sketches will come in, and I will look them over and reject two thirds of them, on account of the subjects not being interesting, the artists sketching whatever they come across that looks “pretty” and not hunting for the most interesting alone.’ This is the amount of what he said to me and finished it up by telling me that all of mine were of interest and composed well, which was the very thing I studied for and which most troubled me on account of the time it took and the consequent small number of my sketches. Mr. Bunce was perfectly delighted, and if I please him as well in my drawings on the wood, he will probably wish to send me off again, when I will in all probability receive ‘$40.00 per week and expenses.’ He gave me four large blocks nearly ‘full page’ to start on and the rest

William Hamilton Gibson

Age, 23

will come along as fast as I want them; and will amount to about $400 worth of work. Besides this I have plenty of work from Filmer, in a hurry, another very large job from Appleton (on stone), stacks of work for Leslie and plenty else besides, scarcely knowing where to begin. My bill to D. App. & Co. for my trip was considerably over $100, which they paid without a word not even wishing an item.

“It does seem rather strange to me that whatever I undertake to do, always ends in success, and in unexpected success. To be sure it is done by hard work and I do not see why any one cannot succeed who will put their shoulder to the wheel, be ambitious and full of resolution to surmount all difficulties. So far I have not made a failure, and one reason has been that I have not attempted a thing to which I did not feel equal. I am thankful that I do succeed, and I recognize, through all my experience in business, and in my efforts to advance, the ever present help and guidance of a good and kind Providence.”

On the 29th of October, 1873, he was married to Miss Emma L. Blanchard of Brooklyn. The occasion was made the more interesting by the marriage of his sister Juliet, and the double service was performed by Mr. Beecher. In the following spring he made a sketching trip to Washington, D. C., making pictures for “Picturesque America.” He was now doing good work and receiving constant employment. He says of the Washington sketches, especially having in mind a “combination” which included many of the public buildings:

“Brooklyn, Apr. 19, 1874.

“My Dear Mother:

“I am only going to write you a few lines to-night (which by the way has generally been my expressed intention every time I have written) and for fear that I may possibly overstep that intention I have selected a larger sheet of paper than usual, and expect at least to confine the limits of my letter therein.

“Mr. Bunce was very much pleased with my rendering of a difficult subject, and one which had worried him considerably. I took him the drawing yesterday, and received another commission from him, more work for the ‘Picturesque America.’ My drawings will already appear under three heads, viz.: ‘Providence and Suburbs,’ ‘Connecticut Shore,’ and ‘Washington and Mt. Vernon,’ and now there is still another to be added. I am to proceed immediately with Brooklyn and Prospect Park, and expect to begin my sketching to-morrow, of course being paid as I am usually, for my time. The series will not be very extensive, probably a combination or two with a few small separate pictures. I hope that this new work will not interfere with my intended visit with you during arbutus season. I will try and manage so as to bring my work up there for I hope to spend three or four days with you. Be sure and let us know when the arbutus is in bloom.”

In the fall of 1876 Gibson published through James Miller a book for boys, of which a fuller word will be said later in these pages. It bore the title, alluring to any boy, “The Complete American Trapper; or the Tricks of Trapping and Trap-Making.” It was republished by two other firms, and still has a market.

These were the years of apprenticeship and study. The young man’s art class was his own studio. His course of study was determined by the business needs of those who employed him. His chief instructor was himself. The years went quickly by. A trip to the Adirondacks in 1875, another to Philadelphia to sketch the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 were the chief incidents of the next two years. The Philadelphia enterprise was under the patronage of Harper Brothers. For at last he had secured the approval he had coveted so much, and was able to win his way into the publications of this house on his own merits. From time to time he had shown his work to Mr. Parsons, who admitted his progress and acknowledged his growing promise. At last he received an order to illustrate an article in conjunction with his friend Beard. Other work followed, and he was a recognized contributor to the Harpers’ publications.

But the work which probably made his “calling and election sure” was his masterly illustration of an article written by Mrs. Helen S. Conant, entitled “Birds and Plumage.” Gibson had suggested the article, furnishing the idea and proposing as a title “The Plumage of Fashion.” He did not secure the commission to write the text: his abilities as a writer had not been demonstrated, and he himself was diffident about them. But he received the order for sixteen illustrations, into which we may well believe he threw his whole strength. The initial design attracted marked attention and drew out unstinted praise. It was a full-page picture of a peacock’s feather. It gave the article instant success. The press was enthusiastic in commending it. The August number of “Harper’s Magazine” for 1878 may be said to have marked a new epoch in American illustration; and young Gibson’s work led all the rest. The reserved and refrigerated criticism of the “Nation” was relaxed almost to the point of enthusiasm: “The remarkable series of birds drawn on the block by Mr. William H. Gibson is more obviously than the imitations just mentioned the result of the engraver’s skill and unwearied patience. The cut of the peacock feather, for instance, which introduces the paper on ‘Birds and Plumage,’ must impress even the uninitiated with its rare and costly character, whether regarded as a design or as an engraving. Mr. Gibson has evidently studied his subjects with great care and succeeded in portraying them, both in action and in repose, in a graceful and life-like manner, with instructive accessories.” The “Christian Union,” always careful and conservative, said: “Upon this article, which has been a long time in preparation, the publishers have, it is understood, laid out an unprecedentedly large sum of money. Certainly Mr. Gibson’s graceful pencil has given them the worth of it. No better work, it is safe to say, has ever appeared in the pages of the magazine.”

But best and most conclusive of all the words of praise which this drawing elicited, were those of Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in a personal letter to the young artist:

“Cambridge, Nov. 8, 1878.

“Dear Sir: I am much obliged to you for your note, for it gives me an opportunity which I have desired, to express to you my admiration of the skill and beauty of the design of the peacock’s feather, so excellently cut on wood by Mr. King. It is not merely subtle and refined execution which is shown in the piece, but a poetic feeling for the quality and charm of the feather itself and for its value in composition. Your feather ought to be as well known as Rembrandt’s shell or Hollar’s furs. For you and Mr. King in your joint work have succeeded in suggesting the splendor, the play, the concentration of color, the bewildering multiplicity of interlacing curves, the elastic spring and vitality of every fiber, and have given the immortality of art to one of the purely decorative productions of nature. I shall look for your new work with great interest.

“I am very desirous to see a proof of your feathers on soft India paper. If I can find some proper paper here I shall be tempted to send it to you. But paper suitable for such work is not easily found.”

All this was said of the youth who six years before had been pronounced without even the promise of ability! Surely he had a right to be proud of his triumph. He had fairly won his spurs. Henceforth there was no doubt of his standing as one of the first of American illustrators.

”The Peacock’s Feather” (“The Peerless Plume”)

(“Highways and Byways”)
Copyright, 1882, by Harper & Brothers

CHAPTER III
A QUICK SUCCESS

FROM this time forward, Gibson’s success as an artist was assured. And not very long after, he was induced to try his hand at authorship, with results quite as convincing. During the summer of 1878 he spent his vacation, in company with his wife, in the old homes at Newtown and at Washington, Connecticut. Returning to the city in the autumn, and recounting his delightful experiences to Mr. Alden, the editor of “Harper’s Magazine,” the latter insisted that Gibson should put them into an article which he should also illustrate. But even with the practice which he had given himself, in the brief articles he had furnished with many of his drawings, he distrusted his own capacity for literary work. He had no such innate sense of power to write as made him so confident with his pencil. He demurred at the proposition; but Mr. Alden was firm and persistent. “Write it just as you have told it to me,” was his encouraging word. His suggestion was followed, and in the August number of the monthly appeared an affectionate sketch of the old boyhood homes, under the title, which was but a thin disguise, “Hometown and Snug Hamlet.” It proved an instant success. The note struck was genuine and pleasing. The illustrations won the public eye. The canny editor suggested a similar article which should cover the winter phases of country life in the same vein. It was prepared, and appeared in the number for March, 1880; and had a reception as enthusiastic as his former venture. The idea of completing the cycle of the seasons was inevitable, and in June there followed the article on “Spring-Time,” which was pronounced “the most attractive paper” of this number of the magazine, whose “rhythmic prose” was not less highly commended than its illustrations, which another critic called “almost as good as spring itself.” In November the series was rounded out with “An Autumn Pastoral,” which led a reviewer to say “Mr. Gibson is a great artist, and has a great future before him.”

In 1879 he furnished illustrations for E. P. Roe’s “Success with Small Fruits,” which appeared serially in “Scribner’s Magazine,” and which opened the way to an intimate friendship with the author. He made the designs for the poems of the Goodale sisters, “In Berkshire with the Wild-flowers.” But these were mere incidents in the work he was turning off, for half the firms in New York City, and on all sorts of subjects having to do with nature, with animal life, with flowers, and with fruits. In the spring he made a visit to “Roeland” to sketch, and he divided his August vacation between Connecticut and the White Mountains, where he gathered material for a year’s hard work. He busied himself, too, with work in water color, steadily keeping his ideals in mind, and his own art-training in hand.

In the fall of 1880, the four papers which had appeared in “Harper’s Magazine” were collected and published in a sumptuous volume, entitled “Pastoral Days.” It was a book which yesterday would have been called “epoch-making”; to-day it would only be called “record-breaking.” The simple truth about it is that it really touched the high-water mark in the history of nature-illustration by means of wood-engraving. It was everywhere hailed as exhibiting the very best work of its kind ever achieved. The praise which fell to Gibson himself was twofold; for it was an enthusiastic recognition of his talent both as author and as artist. His engravers were applauded for the skill and spirit with which they interpreted his designs. His publishers were commended for the unstinted generosity which had balked at no pains or cost. Even the printer received a curtain-call. For the “Evening Post” with great discrimination insisted that much of the success of the work was due to “another artist, whose name is nowhere given. That artist’s name is David Lewis and he passes his days in the press-room of Harper Brothers, amid the clatter of the printing-machines, engaged in the grimy work of his office.” The “Evening Mail” expressed the unanimous verdict of art circles when it declared: “Writers on art spoke of the days of Bewick with a sort of despair, as though no one like him might ever be expected again. It has been reserved for the United States to show that wood has, for the purposes of engraving, capacities of which Bewick never dreamed, and to produce a school of artists who in treating landscape, at least upon wood, have surpassed everything on the other side of the ocean. In the first rank of these artists stands Mr. William Hamilton Gibson.” The London “Times” in a long notice spoke of his having “the rare gift of feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine touch of an expert draughtsman which enable him to select and to draw with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown.” Even the “Saturday Review” in a notice a column and a half in length, confessing its ignorance of Mr. Gibson and his work, declared that his drawings were so full of delicate fancy and feeling, and his writing so skilful and graceful, that it hoped “to hear more of him soon, in either function or both.” In hardly more than two years from the time of his first illustrations Gibson had made his way to the very front rank of the world’s illustrators. His position was truly of his own achieving; and he never fell back from the eminence he had so fairly won. His friend Mr. Charles N. Hurd of the Boston “Transcript” does the situation no more than simple justice in a letter written upon reading the “Saturday Review” article:

“Transcript Office,
“324 Washington Street, cor. Milk Street,
“Boston, May 18, 1881.

“My dear Gibson:

“I congratulate you from the very bottom of my heart on the magnificent article on ‘Pastoral Days’ in the Saturday Review, which, you will see by the papers I send, I have copied into the Transcript. Nothing could have been more gracefully done, and then, in the Saturday Review, one of the very hardest to please of all the British journals! Why, my dear fellow, they never said half so much before of any literary American, living or dead. And there isn’t an ‘if’ in the whole article! I feel as rejoiced about it as if I had some personal share in the glory. If you haven’t a right now to carry your chin high on Broadway then nobody in New York has. I tell you, it’s a great thing to be appreciated; to get praise where you feel that it rests wholly and altogether upon the merits of your work, and has in it no spark of flattery. I can imagine how long the way home seemed that night, and how happy you two were in reading over what the two-thousand-mile-away critic had written. It is worth a good many years’ hard pulling to have one such day.”

One great and decisive reason why he moved on so steadily was his constant ambition to improve upon what he had done. One might easily be misled by the tone of his confidential letters to his mother and others into thinking him overconfident in himself, and a little puffed up by his quick and overwhelming success. But the thought would be absolutely unfair. He was not vain; he was never self-satisfied; he never rested in what he had achieved. After the rousing reception of “Pastoral Days,” he could write to Colonel Gibson in quiet Fryeburg: “I have just finished the last of my White Mountain illustrations—four months’ work—and am beginning a new series of original articles which shall ‘knock spots’ out of all past work. You ask in a previous letter, ‘Can you beat “Pastoral Days”’? Good gracious! The book is so full of shortcomings to me that I wonder at the astonishing appreciation of it. There are a few illustrations in it that I hardly expect to improve very much upon; but as to the average excellence I can ‘see it’ and ‘go a hundred better.’ Perhaps the result will not be as popular. Can’t tell. But I can do better work.” That was the key-note of his life. To do something better next time was the rule of his endeavor. To do something different each time, to turn some new page, follow some new trail, record some new traits of his favorite world, was another characteristic of his purposes. And it kept him from becoming repetitious and tiresome, as he repeatedly piqued curiosity with his novel enterprises in nature-study.

In the late summer of 1880 he spent six weeks in sketching among the White Mountains, whence he went to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for another six weeks of rest. He came home laden with sketches and with photographs, which were at once utilized in making the illustrations for Drake’s “Heart of the White Mountains.” He worked at these with diligence, as we have seen, never a day, apparently, passing without its picture; but it was far into the following spring before the series was finished. The volume was issued in 1881, but before its appearance he was well along with the text and the illustrations for the new articles in the magazine, in the same vein as “Pastoral Days.” In expanded form they were published in the fall of 1882 under the title “Highways and Byways.” It would have seemed improbable that the reception given to his first volume could be repeated. Novelty does so much with Americans to arouse enthusiasm, and they are so quick to compare the later with the former effort, that it might have been predicted that a second volume striking the same note as Gibson’s first success would not be so warmly praised. But the public liked the note, and it pronounced the new book better than the old. The press notices of ’82 and ’83 are in the same strain of unaffected admiration and delight as those of two years before. Perhaps he had most reason to be proud of the approval the new book won from the staid London “Academy” and from Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s “Portfolio.” The former, though a little late in discovering him was ingenious in its sweeping approval. “Fancy to yourself” said the “Academy,” “a Thoreau who has read both Darwin and Ruskin, and who has learned to use the pencil of Birket Foster. To this add the finest workmanship of the American school of wood-engraving, and all the luxury of the richest paper and the clearest type, and you may form some idea of the handsome book now before us. At first it attracted only by the rare delicacy of its drawings, which reproduce with unrivaled truth the exquisite tracery of vegetation, and the ‘ebon and ivory’ of Nature’s shadows. But when we discovered that the artist is also the author, we began to read; and we found ourselves unable to stop till we got to the end.” “We feel that we have here far more than in most American books, a genuine product of the soil.” Mr. Hamerton credits the new book with “a love of nature that is Wordsworthian in its reverence, the close and patient observation of an artist, the peculiar humor of a genial American in the study of men and things.” To such expressions as these, Mr. George William Curtis, voicing the sentiment of his own countrymen, said of him: “Mr. William Hamilton Gibson’s reputation as one of the first of modern artists for wood-engraving, is established and secure.” “It is hard to believe that the blended softness, vigor, and individuality of the art could go further than in the illustrations of this choice volume.”

He had found time during the year for no little study and work in water-color, and even began to essay painting in oils. Despite a long illness of eight months he contributed to several exhibitions and finished a number of new pictures. His goal was always to be a painter. In all the heat of his endeavor and the intoxication of his success he never forgot his ideals, never slackened his march toward the highest art in the most approved forms and mediums.

In May, 1883, his first child was born, and he was soon writing to “Dear Mother Gunn,” in answer to her importunate inquiries, all about the new-comer. “Hamilton Gibson then is his name I understand, though not a gift from me, but simply because I have not the heart to refuse anything to my precious wife just now. So she has christened him as above in spite of much foreboding on my part, as to the probable curtailment of his cognomen among the contemporaneous specimens of his genus in the days which will soon be upon us. I have waited so long for this little angel to come, that I hardly dare realize to the full the happiness which has befallen me lest I awake in bitterness to find it all a tantalizing dream.... But ere long I suppose the reality will be brought home to me more effectually,—a few hours’ perambulating in the ‘wee sma’ hours’ every night for a week or two would dispel all doubts or fears, and place the experience on the basis of solid prosaic reality. At present writing, however, I can truthfully say, as every antecedent pa has done, that he is the best baby alive, quiet, absorbent, and somnolent to a degree of perfection which leaves nothing to be desired. Only last night, after taking his meal, (at least that is what I understand they feed him on) he was placed upon his pillow at ten o’clock and slept like a chrysalis till half-past five this morning. During the day to be sure he is not quiescent for quite so long a period, as then nature seems to ‘abhor the vacuum’ more than ever.”

The year 1883 was devoted to the illustration of E. P. Roe’s “Nature’s Serial Story,” a work into which he entered with heartiness and sympathy. Much time, too, was given to the preparation of the “Memorial” of Mr. Gunn, a volume issued under the direction of an association of his old pupils, commemorative of his striking personality and of the old days in the school at Washington. This book was finely illustrated by the hand of his loving pupil, who also wrote the introduction which was to have been written by Mr. Beecher, whose death occurred while the

God’s Miracle

By permission of the
Curtis Publishing Company

work was in progress. The summer vacation was spent, as usual, in hard work, the scene of his labors being in the White Mountains, at Lake George, ending with two weeks in Washington, where he took many photographs and made many sketches for the “Memorial.” There was much painting in water-color for exhibitions here and there, with many sales at good prices. From time to time in 1885 and 1886 he furnished more of the charming articles which the public had learned to look for and to love. “Harper’s Magazine” for October, 1886, contained a surprise and a new delight to his readers in the shape of the famous “Back-Yard Studies,” in which he challenged the belief of the average man, and even astonished himself with the story of the variety of wild-flowers which he found growing in his city yard. A friend had expressed a longing to study wild flowers, but felt that there was no hope of gratifying herself as long as she lived in the city. Gibson advised her to utilize her back-yard, and ventured the guess that he could gather twenty-five different species of plants in his grass-patch, as the harvest of the seed sown by the breezes, the insects, and occasional birds. The next morning he made a count, and was himself surprised to see his “finds” running up to a total of sixty-four different species. The description of his wild garden in these sordid and unromantic surroundings made him new friends and strengthened his old ones in the assurance that he would never fail them in nature-wisdom or originality of vein. For he showed, as he himself maintained, how the back-yard “may become a means of grace, and with its welcome, peaceful symbols of the woodside and the hay-field, the wood-path, pasture, and the farmyard, serve to reawaken and console the latent yearnings of our unfortunate metropolitan exile.” In the fall of 1886 the new volume appeared, to greet a larger public than ever, enthusiastic in its praise and appreciation. One of his reviewers linked his name most happily with some of the favorites of an earlier day. “At the Christmas season of the last generation there was a general anticipation of a new holiday book from Dickens and Thackeray, and the expectation was rewarded year after year. We are coming to cherish the same hope of a Christmas book from William Hamilton Gibson.” With equal fitness this writer assigned him that place which the popular consensus had now begun to allot him, saying, “Mr. Gibson must take his place, as an acute and delightful observer of nature, with Gilbert White, and Henry Thoreau, and John Burroughs.” His niche was secure, his right to it now unquestioned; and all qualified judges saw that he had in himself a quality quite his own, a temperament, a gift, a qualification to sound his own note and deliver a fresh message.

The next months ensuing Gibson spent in working up material for the illustration of a series of papers prepared by Mr. Charles Dudley Warner and Mrs. Rebecca Harding Davis, descriptive of life and nature in the South. In March, 1886, he had left New York to join Mr. Warner in New Orleans. They made a tour, two months in length, covering Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, in which he took over five hundred photographs and accumulated much material in notes and sketches. A bright and picturesque letter to his wife gives a fine reminiscence of this delightful trip.

“New Iberia, La.
“May 12/86.

“My dear Wife:—

“I have just returned from a trip in the outlying country to find your two letters awaiting me. Since leaving New Orleans I have been gadding about the country north, east, south and west, and am not yet done. The Téche country is mightily interesting if one can only live through it. The days come and go and are filled with enjoyment, but as to the night no man knoweth what may be in store for him. My hotel experiences would interest you, but I cannot write them. I left New Orleans with a Mr. William King as a companion, a young man who knows the country thoroughly and whose company Mr. Warner recommended I should request, as Warner was obliged to leave for the north. By the time we reach New Orleans again about five days hence, we shall have traveled together over one thousand miles of the Téche and other Louisiana territory. The weather has been charming, no hot weather which has not been deliciously tempered by the never failing breeze from the gulf. Cool breezy nights.

“We have driven for a whole day over a prairie peopled with all sorts of wild things in the way of birds. Meadow larks, plover, snipe, white and blue herons, buzzards, egrets, many birds so tame that they could easily be killed by a cut of my whip. We drove through acres and acres of blue flag in blossom, and for miles pursued the shaded roads through dense woods draped in the ever-present festoons of moss—in this country seen in its fullest perfection, every tree being laden with it, hanging like heavy trailing curtains, sometimes twenty feet in length. The effect in a breeze is indescribably beautiful. The Téche Country is the paradise of Louisiana, and comes as a welcome contrast to the filth and squalor of the city of New Orleans with which I was so nauseated. To-night we leave for the Averys’. We shall arrive there to-night and I anticipate a fine time visiting Jefferson’s Island and making trips up the various bayous. We shall try to get away from there Friday evening in time to get the steamer ‘Iberia’ here by which we shall return, through a sail of about 300 miles by lake, bayou, and Mississippi River to New Orleans. Thereat I shall spend about three days and then start for the homeward trip, stopping over at Mobile for a day or so. I will be home about June 1 as I originally approximated.

“Of course you know that I am anxious to be at home again. The only way that I can keep my spirits is to throw my mind into the work and interest myself with my surroundings. In the main my health has been good, in fact, excellent, in spite of starvation cookery and God-forsaken hostelries which anywhere else under heaven would be considered good material for bonfires and their proprietors hung.

“A beautiful country and full of interest, if, forsooth, one might exist without a stomach. Everything is Creole—Creole cows, Creole milk, Creole eggs—even the ‘niggers’ are Creoles, and all speak French. My limited vocabulary of pure Parisian French has stood a heavy drain and has occasionally precipitated upon my hearers consequences which I feared would prove serious;—item—Night before last we stopped in a hamlet of shanties and at last found the ‘Hotel,’ kept by a talkative, voluble French idiot and his wife. The only guest bed in the shebang I occupied, and Mr. King slept on a mattress on the floor in another room. I was tired and suffering from an attack of nervous dyspepsia, from the greasy grub which I had been forced to eat in the face of starvation (everything here even a boiled egg is taught to swim in hot fat, and is only rescued therefrom by the famished boarder, who sometimes is obliged to bolt it after scraping off the congealed lard). It was with difficulty that I could get to sleep on the night in question, owing to my indisposition, together with a certain nervous apprehension as to the census of my immediate surroundings. I had barely dropped off into a snooze when I was startled by the movement of the window shutter near my bed, when looking, I observed a mule who was making a meal of a table-cloth near my bed. Once more after lying awake an hour I had begun to congratulate myself on prospects of slumber, when a shrill piercing note of a mocking-bird struck up its piccolo in the dead of night, another and another joined in the chorus, and kept this up for an hour before it dawned upon me that the birds were in cages on the farther side of the very partition of my room. On which discovery you may perhaps imagine how the limited French vocabulary at my command was exhausted and reinforced, but to no purpose. I raved and swore in Dutch, French, and Pidgeon English and was at length compelled to yell my colored servant (driver, servant, and interpreter) from his slumbers and make him translate a short address to the French idiot (who snorted in blissful sleep in concert with his spouse in another quarter of the shanty) to the effect that the offending birds be immediately chucked out of doors, beheaded, or strangled. The shrieking trio was finally removed to the rear but my sleep was ruined for that night. Only toward morning after dawn had just begun to lighten the east did I begin to feel drowsy, but at this point the ‘moqueurs’ were again restored to their original places and I was compelled to have them again removed, and by this time Monsieur and Madame were up and about preparing our morning ‘grease’ which they seemed to be doing by sheer force of lungs and belaboring of pans and kettles.

“At breakfast I drank the proprietor’s health.

“‘Monsieur, votre santé! Votre hospitalité est magnifique! Votre table est bien gré! Votre moqueur—! Ah! Votre moqueur! (a pause with dramatic enthusiasm, then continuing) vous procurez deux, trois, quatre plus moqueurs! et votre hôtel est perfection!’

“This eloquent outburst greatly amused the Madame, but the old man seemed ‘busting’ with suppressed emotion, which probably, had he then been in pocket for his bill, would have shown some outward token.

“We left this place for the day and after settling the bill, we told them that we would leave our satchels until we returned in the evening, whereupon ‘la madame’ through my interpreter, asked me if she should prepare a meal for us for evening. I asked her in reply if she would cook anything I wished, to order. She replied ‘Oui! anything I can get.’ Whereupon I ordered ‘three moqueurs on toast!’ much to her discomfiture, and she grumbled to herself as she left us, which grumble being translated would signify, ‘My God! three mocking birds! that feast would cost you thirty dollars!’”

The rest of the year was spent in working up the material thus gathered, and much of the following winter and spring. The summer of 1887 was passed in Washington, Connecticut, where, as a note in his journal tells us, he “spent a very busy season. Made many drawings for two prospective articles on ‘Midnight Rambles’ and ‘Insect Botanists,’ besides many flower-studies and a number of water-colors. Very busy on the ‘Memorial’ volume to Mr. Gunn. Made a large number of drawings for botany.” The last remark refers to a large scheme which now possessed his teeming brain, a plan to write an illustrated botany. He never dropped his purpose,—indeed, abandoned plans were unknown in his life-history,—and before his death he had accumulated over 1500 drawings toward such a work. There have been many such undertakings put forth, successful and valuable. But it is impossible to think without a pang of the wonderful work he would have made out of his accurate knowledge and his matchless art!

The “Memorial” was published in 1887, and he went on with the articles and the water-colors, busy all the time, and always laying out work in advance of his swiftest execution. The spring of 1888 brought the opportunity for a trip to Europe, which included a tour in Great Britain, France, Holland, and Switzerland, with a fortnight in London and another in Paris. His camera and his pencil were both busy, but the new experiences made only an episode in his busy life. He was interested in all the art he saw, and the life of the people appealed to him there, as it did at home. A letter describing his impressions of Holland shows the spirit in which he traveled and the things he elected to see.

“Since last writing you I have enjoyed a week (or more I fear) of rare incident and experience, my days being so full and my evenings so tired that I have failed again in my good intentions as to frequency of letters.

“I hurried your last letter into the mail and am somewhat in doubt whether it reached the Queenstown post in time. Since that writing we (which means a party of Van Ingen, Willis, Roberts, McGrath, Dunthorne and myself) have visited successively Flushing, Rotterdam, The Hague, Dordrecht, Scheveningen, Amsterdam and Brussels. Of course our visit has been brief as the period of time represented has been but four days. The picture galleries have received most of our attention at these places, but at Dordrecht and Scheveningen we found the living pictures unmatched by any in the respective art exhibitions. Dort is a perfect treasure of a place, pictorially considered, and I shall live in hopes of revisiting it in the future more at my leisure and with an eye to ‘material.’ You would have been charmed with the quaintness of this old Dutch village with its Venice-like canals, its queer inhabitants, its hundreds of wind-mills and picturesque old boats. We hired a boat and guide and rowed for hours upon one of these meandering waterways—under arched bridges beneath which we had to stoop; beneath overhanging balconies bright with flowering plants and with an occasional saucy or coquettish face half disclosed between the Venetian blinds at the windows, occasionally with a giggle accompaniment or a handkerchief manœuvered in a manner which would have done credit to a French or Spanish coquette. The little Dutch ‘yongen’ or Deutscher ‘pups’ saluted us with questionable slang or with stones or what-not, at every private quay or alley-way opening on the canal and altogether our turnout with its noisy exclamatory cargo was a great center of attraction to contiguous neighborhoods whose windows were usually filled with curious spectators mostly on a broad grin of Dutch proportions and typical comeliness, and ’tis true occasionally relieved by a disclosure which our Scotch friend Roberts assured us was ‘bonny’ and which commentary I was pleased to verify, and which moreover was the signal of a chorus of ‘ah’s’ from our bateau that would have done credit to a West Brighton populace at the ‘busting’ of a rocket. Our trip was occasionally varied by a landing at some quaint quay or alley, and a rummaging visit to some musty old bric-a-brac den or junk shop. The streets were of the queerest in architecture and life—queer old women with brass headgear and huge sabots or wooden shoes, and voices like a fog-horn, peddling their green goods, their eggs, milk or whatever, their treasures suspended from yokes, and borne with apparent pleasure. I have bought one of their huge brass milk cans and a few other of their distinguishing paraphernalia for our front parlor over the mantel—(a part of the foregoing was penned late last night but I was so utterly tired that I had to quit in the midst of a sentence which I presume you can detect by examination). I am in the same condition to-night (Friday, May 25th), having spent seven mortal hours on my feet in the ‘Louvre’ to say nothing of the exhaustion which the visit has brought to the other end of my person. Yesterday I was seven hours at the Salon, viewing the miles of pictures and occasionally imagining myself in a harem or in a feminine quarter of a Turkish bath by mistake. I shall go again to-morrow, as I did not see one half of the bathers yesterday and besides there are a few landscapes that I want to get a peep at, if the fleshly charmers will only give a fellow half a chance. 5000 pictures!!! to say nothing of about three acres of statuary!

“I shall spend a week here at Paris and shall then leave for Switzerland, including Chamounix, Interlaken, Rigi, Lucerne, &c., returning after about a week’s trip direct to London there to spend the few days prior to my return. I shall sail with Van Ingen on the ‘Adriatic’ June 13th and shall be most happy to be with my loved ones again. How truly do we measure time by voluminousness of incident. Our Holland trip of 4 days seemed like a month and it seems a half year since I left you in New York. In my hours—say rather moments—of repose I am homesick and my tired feeling adds to the nostalgia. Mr. Van Ingen and McGrath left me in my tracks to-day, and the way I am dispensing my hybrid French to the natives hereabouts is a case of wilful persecution. But I get along better than I would have supposed. I have raked up my old vocabulary and with a reinforcement of grins, gesticulations and shrugs, it is surprising how quickly my victim succumbs. Once in a while it is true I chance upon an ass who don’t catch on, but as a rule I manage to make my patient comprehend my intentions. Everything thus goes well until he starts in, and the average Frenchman can pronounce three words at once with most facile ease and evident delight. I generally wait until he has run through his dictionary from Alfred to Omaha and then inform him that I haven’t understood a word that he has been saying and beg of him to begin again and go slow. When he comprehends that he is to be remunerated by time, and not by the job, and turns out words instead of mush, his lingo is not half so overpowering or so enigmatical. I had the honor to compliment a waiter to-day upon his excellent French when indulged in moderation, bringing a touching parable to my rescue, likening his ‘escargot’ speech to my dish of small isolated boiled potatoes and his ‘chemin du fer’ French to my ‘haricot’ much to his delight and comprehension.”

In 1888 his second son was born, and the happy father writes of the new baby to Colonel Gibson, excusing himself for not having made him a visit: “I have found that we cannot always bend circumstances to our wills, especially when those aforesaid circumstances are materialized in the shape of bills payable, taxes, insurance, houses, wives (I beg pardon, wife), and babies! Yes, babies! For Hamilton Jr. no longer runs this establishment; I enclose the counterfeit presentment of a successor of his who makes us all toe the mark, and bosses the entire household. Is it possible that his fame has not reached your latitude? He has his own way hereabouts, and we imagined that the limits of New England had at least been brought within earshot of his lungs. But he is a darling, if he does take after his daddy. His name is Dana Gibson; (not Charles A.) but old Judge Dana, Richard Dana, his ancestor.”

The year 1889 found him busy with the erection of a new story to his Brooklyn house and his instalment there in a studio which became a favorite theme for newspaper gossip and description. In Washington, too, he acquired another studio for his summer days, in the shape of a little old schoolhouse which was familiar to him in his boyhood. In the autumn of this year he recorded the idea of a “prospective work ‘Eyes to the Blind’ to be prepared with a view to book publication. Made proposition to Harpers who requested me to run the same through the year in ‘Young People,’ one page each, with about 200 drawings.” This, is of course, that favorite work which finally took the name of “Sharp Eyes” and attained such wide popularity. Writing of this new scheme to his friend Colonel Gibson, in Fryeburg, Maine, he opens his mind and heart in his own direct and exuberant way. The letter was written in August, 1890.

“This series will run through the year, and you may like to know how it all came about. Know then that my head gradually got so big with the muchness of learning that I had to rig up a safety valve of some sort, or bust! This would have been an unpleasant denouement for myself and especially tough on the immediate surroundings, human or otherwise, and so I hit upon a plan to put all my goods in the show window and get credit for a big reinforcement behind the counter! Great scheme! eh! (that is if they only won’t try to get a look inside!) My note-books, visible and intangible, have been multiplying from year to year with no available opportunities of keeping pace with them in my accustomed magazine facilities. So I concluded to materialize my material in the form of a dainty book, comprising the more interesting incidents of my journal, arranging the incidents or episodes chronologically—a timely item or two for each week in the year, so that the book might serve as a sort of pictorial reference calendar for the saunterer, affording him at least some few hints of the rich store of wonders which surround him unheeded in every field and by every path. I believe there is real true missionary possibility in such a book as that. My plan completed and a little material duly prepared I broached the matter to the Harpers. They jumped at it at once, and much to my astonishment made me the offer to run it for the entire year of 52 weeks in the ‘Young People,’ an unheard of thing! and something which I had never dreamed of. By this arrangement I not only received much more liberal compensation for the large number of designs than would have been financially possible on the first basis, but in addition realized generously upon the letter press which in the original plan would have been furnished gratis on the customary plan of books paying royalty. In addition to this, inasmuch as the cost of the entire series would of course be charged to the ‘Y. P.’ it gave me a bigger margin both in number and scope of the designs, so that the book as now shaped will be more generously illustrated than as first planned. The series will end with the Xmas number and will then begin to take its book form with numerous fresh additions of tail-pieces and other morceaux, comprising some 300 illustrations. It will not be issued however until the Christmas of 1891 as I have already on the press a volume for the coming season.

“The title of this—my fifth book—is ‘Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine.’ My two midnight articles taking the lead, and followed by my other magazine papers published during the last two years. ‘Bird-Notes,’ (Harper’s), ‘Bird-Cradles,’ (Scribner’s), ‘Prehistoric Botanists,’ (Century), and ‘Wild Garden,’ (Harper’s), this September (now due).

“You shall see the volume as soon as you are likely to desire it, and whether you take any stock in it or not you will, I hope, give me credit of being a well meaning fellow anyhow.

“There! that’s about as big a dose as even your friendship can stand, and so I’ll come around to my autograph and give you a rest—No—not yet either! I wonder if you can’t do me a little favor, just for the sake of old times and in spite of my sins. In addition to all my other work I have been for years preparing a botany on a new plan, and nearly all the bloomin’ things that grow in these parts have been victimized in my enthusiasm.

“There is one plant, perhaps two, which I remember to have seen and gathered on the sand at Lovell’s pond, but which I never identified, which perhaps you could now help me to secure. A little low thing with a few yellow (or pink) blossoms growing on its extremity, and which I saw in profusion the last time I visited the spot with you. I am afraid that the season is too late, or will be when I could receive them from you, but if you can, after about twelve days, or rather about the date of the third of September gather the plants for me, enclose them in a tin spice box, no water, and mail them to me here at Washington, Conn., you will earn my thanks anew. Plants enclosed in tin boxes, with air-tight covers, will keep fresh for days—indeed for many days longer than the same plant would keep in a vase of water.

“And now, my dear friend, au revoir! I sincerely wish that we might meet again if only to clasp hands and exchange greeting, but until another year at least it seems improbable. To-morrow I leave to visit friends in the Adirondacks for two weeks returning here to keep my nose to the grindstone until November when I return to Brooklyn,

“Good bye, regards to all. W. H. G.”

In season for the holidays in 1890 “Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine” was ready; and Gibson had another surprise for the nature-lovers in the chapters on “A Midnight Ramble,” and “Night Witchery.” All he had done was to take his lantern and wander among the grasses and the wild-flowers as they slept, and to tell the story of what he saw and heard. But when he had done with them, his readers all felt, at second-hand, indeed, but keenly enough, as he himself had done, “We have explored a new world—a realm which we can look in the face on the morrow, with an exchange of recognition impossible yesterday.” Edmund Clarence Stedman, suggesting possible choice of material for the “Library of American Literature,” said of this article,” I scarcely believe that you or any one has of late written anything more novel or more poetic than your espionage in the camp of the flowers at midnight.”

All the next year was devoted to work upon “Sharp Eyes,” which appeared in the late autumn of 1891. The intent and scope of the book has been told in the author’s letter to his friend. He puts his purpose succinctly in a paragraph of the introduction, which he quaintly entitled “Through My Spectacles”: “‘Sharp Eyes,’ then, is, in brief, a cordial recommendation and invitation to walk the fields and woods with me and reap the perpetual harvest of a quiet eye, which Nature everywhere bestows; to witness with me the strange revelations of this wild bal masqué, to laugh, to admire, to study, to ponder, to philosophize,—between the lines,—to question, and always to rejoice and give thanks.”

Meantime, he was hard at work pushing the studies for his botany. With the sketches he was making for this purpose, he was also making more water-colors, sending them to the various exhibitions, and arranging sales of his own. He was at work on new articles for the “Young People” continuing the unexhausted vein he had opened for these pages. For older readers he was beginning the articles on the cross-fertilization of flowers which foreshadowed the wonderful charts and lectures with which he delighted and informed the whole country. He had begun to lecture too, and he notes in his journal, July 23, 1891, “At Mrs. Van Ingen’s suggestion, I have concluded to give a series of ten familiar talks on Nature, covering botany, entomology, and ornithology, two each week.” This was the beginning of successive series of lectures, covering four years. From these home talks his work in this field grew and multiplied. Soon he was lecturing with these amazing charts before the clubs in New York, before colleges and schools, and finally before popular audiences. In the winter of 1893-94, he made the venture of a series of six lectures in Hardman Hall, New York City, which netted him the handsome sum of eight hundred and fifty dollars, and drew from the veteran manager, Major Pond, an expression of wonder: “The news of your success in Hardman Hall is phenomenal. I can assure you that you are the only man in the United States who could have done such a business.”

Then the calls began to come from all over the country. The same energy, industry, and genius which he had put into his painting and his writing he threw with increasing intensity into this new work. In 1894 he lectured sixty-four times. His success in the new field was instant and complete. It was as thoroughgoing with scientific folk as it was with the children and the plain people. The press had nothing but wonder and commendations. It was an epoch in the popular presentation of scientific fact and research unequaled since the days of Agassiz.

But somehow, in the midst of this new interest and the engagements it brought, he found the time to bring out still another book, as novel and as fascinating as any of its predecessors; and though it dealt with what at first sight seemed an unlovely theme, it was perhaps the most beautiful of his volumes. Promptly on calendar time in 1895 came “Our Edible Mushrooms and Toadstools,” destined to be the forerunner of a fungus-literature growing with every year. Its accuracy satisfied the scientific; its information gratified the popular mind; its illustrations were a joy to the mushroom-hunters. And his originality in treatment gave a hint to the publishers which they have been quick to follow and which they will be sure to follow for many a year to come.

Two more books were to be added to the list of his collected writings, “Eye Spy,” and “My Studio Neighbors,” both volumes in the same vein as “Sharp Eyes,” and made up of his magazine articles. But before they were gathered between covers, he had finished his brief career and had passed on. The last entry in his journal was made on June 12, 1896, to record, as did all his brief notes, nothing but a new item of work,—“Lecture, Holiday House.” He was already in the grip of death. The fierce fires of a relentless industry had burned his forces to a cinder. Through the summer days he languished and drooped, yet would not wholly give over work, nor cease his planning. On the 16th of July, among the hills of Washington, he suddenly died from apoplexy. His overtaxed frame gave way, and, at the early age of forty-six, he slept the long sleep of the body, in the beautiful home he had reared for himself, among those dearest scenes.

Perhaps there is no more fitting close to this hurried sketch of his career than a reference to this beautiful home which he made for himself out of the earnings of his toil, and which seems to have embodied the desires and the noble purposes of his whole life. It was natural, inevitable, than he should choose Washington as the site of this new hearthstone. He located it upon a hillside sloping to the river-valley, with a long and entrancing outlook to distant southern hills. He left the wild-flowers to grow undisturbed upon his lawns, and the clumps of low trees which bore their crimson cones in August gave him the right to call the new estate “The Sumacs.” Here he planted his house, building first of all a story of stones gathered from the fields and old walls round-about. Then a “story-and-a-half,” to use New England phraseology, a tasteful adaptation of old Yankee architecture, with hip roof and low studding. Broad piazzas surrounded it, a great hall welcomed the guest, and inviting rooms with enticing prospects through great windows gave a sense of comfortable space within. To complete the ideal of a home, the great fireplace stood ready for the winter backlog, or bore a screen of boughs in summer and in autumn. How bitter the irony of life, in that as soon as he had reared this shrine for his domestic affections, amid scenes for which he had been yearning all his days, imprisoned in the city, among friends of his boyhood, who loved him as few men are loved—what a strange and baffling lot was his, to be summoned from it all, and from the larger future which seemed opening before his eager heart!

The Sumacs

CHAPTER IV
WITH PENCIL AND BRUSH

IT is hard to say whether Gibson was first a naturalist and afterwards an artist, or first an artist and afterwards a naturalist. Art was his mode of expression; but his knowledge of nature furnished the material of what he would express. Art was his speech, but nature was his theme. In point of time there was no difference in the development of these two sides of his nature. His boyhood passion seemed to divide between studying nature and drawing pictures. He wrote of himself in “Pastoral Days” (p. 66): “Insect-hunting had always been a passion with me. Large collections of moths and butterflies had many times accumulated under my hands, only to meet destruction through boyish inexperience; and even in childhood the love for the insect and the passion for the pencil strove hard for the ascendency, and were only reconciled by a combination which filled my sketch-book with studies of insect life.”

His letters are equally full of the nature-subjects he is treating and of the ways in which he is treating them. But there is no question of the strong, irrepressible need of his spirit which drove him to self-expression by pencil and brush. “I am fairly crazy to get to painting,” he said to a friend at the beginning of the last summer of his life. “My lecture course and other business matters have kept me from using my brush lately, and I long to get my colors and go to work.” That was a remark which reveals his whole life, his constant mood. Not only was he always anxious to be at work, but he wanted to be at work with his colors. This urgency drove him to art as a profession. It lightened all his busy years. It ranked him by divine right among the best of American artists.

He was a thorough artist in his love of the technical side of his work. He delighted in mastery of the materials of art. He liked the problems growing out of them. He knew the tools of his craft, and never was hampered by any uncertainty as to what he could do with the means at his command. His use of pencil and brush began early, and he soon knew the possibilities of black and white and water-colors. He was quick to learn the special art of drawing upon wood, for the engraver. He had no fastidious scruples against the camera, but was swift to resort to it and learn its possibilities and make it into a tool to shape his thought. When he turned to color as a medium of expression, he did so with all the

Pen-and-Ink Sketch

From a Letter

enthusiam of a true believer in its power, and a purpose to get at all its resources. Although so much of his early work was translated to the world by the wood-engraver, yet when wood-engraving began to decline, and the publishers took to process-work, and the “half-tone” crowded out the fine, laborious work of the burin, Gibson was not in the least dismayed. He wasted no time or sentiment in mourning the decadent methods, but sought at once to learn the utmost what the new methods would yield to a determined and artistic mind. How successful he was is well shown in that beautiful volume which won such instant favor with his later constituency, “Sharp Eyes.” Its delicate half-tones vie with the wood-engraving in expressiveness, in delicacy, and in poetic feeling; and they are a standing testimony to the artist’s versatility and technical energy. He was never at a loss for a means of expression. The rudest tools were converted to delicate and sufficient implements in his fingers. There are letters from him describing some illustration of his or some painting, in which the pen and ink with which he wrote were made to sketch his work so vividly that one is tempted to rate the tour-de-force of the written page as fine a show of power as the picture it illustrated.

His work, moreover, was strong not only in its mastery of the science of expression, but by its fidelity to the facts of science in its subject-matter. It was a flat refutation of the doctrine, so dear to shallow sentimentalists, that the progress of science must weaken the power and circumscribe the field of art. There is much misleading talk to the effect that science is filching from the realm of the imagination, the kingdom where art thrives, and by its cold light is taking all the glow and loveliness out of the atmosphere in which the fancy has been wont to see its fairest visions. But almost any one of Gibson’s illustrations of natural history, of botanical subjects, or of open-air life and scenery sufficiently refutes this theory. Here is a mind at once faithful to the scientific method, and free in its artistic spirit. Here is the accuracy of the scientist’s eye and the artist’s creative imagination. Turning the pages of “Sharp Eyes,” or indeed almost any of his books, one knows not which to praise the more, his close observation of fact or his easy translation of it into the dress of fancy. One of his critics said: “His pictures sometimes seem ideal, they are wrought with such a light and painstaking touch. Yet close analysis will show them to be almost photographic in their accuracy.” However freely his fancy deals with the facts, he never violates their logic, nor misrepresents their substance. Mr. Roe, in a letter to Gibson once told him: “You understand nature, and are capable of seeing her as she exists. Most other artists have conventional ideas of nature. You can take an actual scene and reproduce it, while at the same time idealizing it.” His methods are a triumphant example of the scientific use of the imagination, and of the imaginative presentation of science. The most hardened Gradgrinds of research could find no fault with his facts, but were astonished and put to confusion by his power to suffuse reality with the glow of a poetic fancy. One critic, writing in the “New York Tribune,” did say of him, in the tone of one pointing out a limitation, “Nimble and agile as he was of intellect, he did not possess breadth and scope of judgment, nor maintain a deliberate balance of interests.” But even this farfetched comment did not deny his fidelity to the facts, but only claimed a tendency to give them wrong values; and moreover the critic was reckoning without a large knowledge of his mind. He confuses Gibson’s business as an artist with what his business might have been as a mere naturalist, and in doing so makes the common mistake of disparaging what is done by showing that it is not something which was not attempted.

Here, for instance, in a chapter on “Ballooning Seeds,” Gibson draws across a page what he calls a “fanciful eddy,” wafting up a swarm of seeds, which fly abroad on the autumn breeze. Every form in the airy sketch is accurate enough for a text-book, yet the whole is fit for the illustration of a poem. Again, in “A Masquerade of Stamens,” his pencil leads down the page out of a sunny meadow a long procession which, beginning in the grasses of the foreground, develops into the exactly drawn forms of a score of curiously fashioned stamens. The illustrations for “Queer Fruits from the Bee’s Basket,” with its decorated initial, showing just the right bee, investigating just the right flower; the laden bees hastening from the clump of bushes in the foreground to the distant hives behind the farmhouse; and finally the sketch at the close, of a group of the odd forms of pollen-dust which the microscope reveals;—these are all examples of a fancy which only serves to illumine, throw light upon, the fact, but never to distort it or to pervert it. In this phase of his work, Gibson carries the office of the illustrator to its highest possible point, and shows all its dignity and power.

He did all this in his own way. No artist of our generation was more thoroughly individual in his methods and in his aim. He sought what his own spirit loved and longed for. He saw with no eyes but his own. He drew and painted after his own fashion. His originality was absolute. He had none of the mannerisms of any man or any school but his own. He asked no one to tell him the color of the grass, or the fashion in which he should paint the clouds. What he did was his own work, what he saw was his own vision. What men called his “versatility” in the choice of “mediums” was his quick sense of fitness and of adaptation. His aim was never loyalty to a school, adherence to a method, repetition of a successful device of technique. It was always, rather, fidelity to nature, adaptation of the medium to the thing represented, variety of method to treat his various themes. If his style became characteristic, it was because he put his own strong mark on all his work. It was as much his own as his autograph. It was William Hamilton Gibson transferred to paper or canvas.

Gibson’s success as an artist was as good for the American people as it was for himself. It was truly a “popular” success. The people, and a great many of them, secured it. For he spoke to them, and they made approving answer. It would be hard to name an artist of his generation who appealed to a larger public, whose work in the magazines was hailed with a heartier delight, whose name stood for a more definite pleasure and appreciation than his. The people liked his work, and they knew why they liked it. One of his most discriminating critics said of him, in 1888:

“Mr. Gibson’s work has been essentially democratic, that is, has reached the many rather than the few, presenting to them studies of nature which stand for a great deal more than mere descriptive picturesqueness, because, as we have said before, they are informed not only with the feeling for the beautiful, but also with the scientific spirit of inquiry and a love of exact truth.” To gain such universal approval without the slightest swerving from his artistic integrity, or any lowering of his artistic standard, was an immense triumph. He realized it, and it gave him great joy. His honest and ingenuous pride in the reception accorded to his early work is well shown in two brief notes to his mother, one in May, the other in July, 1878:

“The bird article is finished and the proofs are beginning to pour in. One or two of them are so fine that their fame has spread over the city, and I am besieged by engravers and artists to see them. One, a full-sized peacock’s feather which takes up a full page of the magazine, is by far the most superb piece of wood-engraving that has ever been accomplished. It is spoken of in art-circles all over the city. It is the opening picture, and will create a sensation. The illustrations number sixteen in all, and Mr. Parsons told Mr. Beard and others that it was the most beautiful and at the same time the most expensive article the magazine had ever gotten up. Mr. Parsons told me that the drawings not only pleased him, but that they exceeded his highest expectations, and that he did not believe there was another man in this country or in any other that could excel them.”

In similar vein, after the notices began to appear, he wrote again:

“Brooklyn, July 27, 1878.

“Dear Mother:—

“I send you to-day a copy of the ‘Nation’ containing notice of Harper’s Magazine. The ‘Nation’ is a high authority and has the reputation of stating the truth. It seldom goes into ecstasies over anything, and such a notice as it has given of my ‘birds’ is considered by the Harpers as a magnificent compliment.”

The qualities of his art in which the public delighted and which came to be characteristic of all his work, were refinement, gracefulness, and truth. He saw the finer qualities of nature, sought out her delicate beauties, loved her humbler moods, objects, episodes. He vindicated his own taste in the paragraph with which he prefaced the chapter on “Sap Bewitched,” over the signature of “Plinius Secundus”:

“We wonder at the mighty and monstrous shoulders of Elephants, we marvel at the strong necks of bulls: we keep a wondering at the ravening of tigers, and the shag manes of Lions: and yet in comparison of insects there is nothing wherein Nature and her whole power is more seen, neither sheweth she her might more than in these least creatures of all.”

In the spirit of those words he wrought at his art. “These least creatures of all” found in him a loving exponent. He saw their charm, and he was not above interpreting it to others. The web of a spider, the nest of a bird, the down of the dandelion, the leaf of the jewel-weed, the tangle of grasses in a fence-corner, the vegetable contents of a city back-yard,—Gibson found beauties in all these least things, which he did not disdain to celebrate. He had learned from Thoreau, chief among American students and expositors of nature, the meaning of the proverb, “Natura maxima in minimis.” His devotion to the Concord recluse, and to his methods, appears in his studies. That discipleship affected his artistic life. It inspired him in his choice of themes and it drew his eyes still closer to the lesser objects and humbler horizons. He wrote to a friend in 1888:

“There are few authors whom I love more than Thoreau.... I have read him with love and reverence, and have visited his haunts as sacred ground, and have pictured those haunts in projected compositions, and yet hope to see them realized.”

He had no apologies whatsoever for having elected the field of what men call the minor forms of life. He knew there was no such thing as major and minor in the things of nature. One may go in either direction and find infinity. A telescope is no more effective than a microscope; and it begins to look as if the atoms would be found as marvelous as the universe. Gibson repeatedly preached this doctrine. In one place he said:

“There is often an almost inexhaustible field for botanic investigation even on a single fallen tree. My scientific friend already alluded to recently informed me, on his return from an exploring tour, that he had spent two days most delightfully and profitably in the study of the yield of a single dead

At the Easel

Brooklyn Studio

tree, and had surprised himself by a discovery by actual count of over a hundred distinct species of plants congregated upon it. Plumy dicentra clustered along its length, graceful sprays of the frost-flower, with its little spire of snow crystals, rose up here and there, scarlet berries of the Indian turnip glowed among the leaves, and, with the crowding beds of lycopodiums and mosses, its ferns and lichens, and host of fungous growths, it became an easy matter to extend the list of species into the second hundred. It is something worth remembering the next time we go into the woods.”

Such study and such affection made him the guide of a great multitude of people in America, teaching them of beauties and graces they had never perceived for themselves. To him thousands of men and women were under the deepest obligation, because he gave knowledge that in small areas and in close quarters one may see great beauties and far-reaching powers and forces. He taught by his art the greatness of the little, the divinity of the familiar. He revealed the wonders of the every-day world, the miracles of the commonplace. He seemed to discern, and had the power to show others, the whole of nature in her humblest parts. He was the prophet of the unnoted and the unprized; for when his appreciative pencil had drawn them, they straightway became noteworthy, brilliant, extraordinary. One feels all the power of this call of his to be the apostle of the unconsidered in a bit of rhapsody over the infinite pictures hung along any country roadside:

“See how the cool gray rails are relieved against that rich dark background of dense olive juniper, how they hide among the prickly foliage! Look at that low-hanging branch which so exquisitely conceals the lowest rail as it emerges from its other side, and spreads out among the creeping briers that wreathe the ground with their shining leaves of crimson and deep bronze! Could any art more daringly concentrate a rhapsody of color than nature has here done in bringing up that gorgeous spray of scarlet sumach, whose fern-like pinnate leaves are so richly massed against that background of dark evergreens? And even in that single branch see the wondrous gradation of color, from purest green to purplish olive melting into crimson, and then to scarlet, and through orange into yellow, and all sustaining in its midst the clustered cone of berries of rich maroon! Verily, it were almost an affront to sit down before such a shrine and attempt to match it in material pigment. A passing sketch, perhaps, that shall serve to aid the memory in the retirement of the studio, but a careful copy, never! until we can have a tenfold lease of life, and paint with sunbeams. But there is more still in this tantalizing ideal, for a luxuriant wild grapevine, that shuts in the fence near by, sends toward us an adventurous branch that climbs the upright rail, and festoons itself from fence to tree, and hangs its luminous canopy over the crest of the yielding juniper. Even from where we stand we can see the pendent clusters of tiny grapes clearly shadowed against the translucent golden screen. Add to all this the charm of life and motion, with trembling leaves and branches bending in the breeze, with here and there a flitting shadow playing across the half hidden rails, and where can you find another such picture, its counterpart in beauty—where? perhaps its very neighbor, for all roadside pictures are ‘hung upon the line,’ they are all by the same great Master, and it is often difficult to choose.”

Two letters must serve as types of hundreds which he received, from every quarter of this country and from England—from California and from Anticosti Island, from Minnesota and from Georgia. The people loved his work. It expressed things they all had felt. It revealed to them things they had never seen. It was at once interpretation and disclosure. They did not know how good it was technically, but they did realize that it was good art in substance and in spirit, and from grateful hearts and lives quickened and enriched by his genius they wrote him their letters of gratitude and recognition. This one is from a Massachusetts town:

“B——, Mass., Aug. 30, ’90.

Dear Mr. Gibson:—

“Your exquisite drawings and no less delightful descriptions have been a constant delight and inspiration to me for ten years. I have often wanted to tell you so, but the fear that a letter of thanks might seem intrusive has kept me silent. You really must forgive me for writing now, however, for your ‘group of pyrolas’ has a fascination quite irresistible.

I resolutely close my Harper only to open again for one more long lingering look at their airy loveliness, and then of course must follow another peep at the lilies and the goodyera and the dainty fern fronds which seem to spring up as spontaneously under your pencil’s magic as they do in our fern-filled woods of B——.

“Do you realize how much you have added to the joy of pastoral days, what an enchantment you have thrown around our highways and byways?

“Almost every favorite flower lives again for me in your illustrations, and many and many a time have I been lifted up and out of weariness or discouragement by your pen or pencil, for your word pictures are as vivid as the others.

“Let me thank you too for your suggestions. ‘There is a spiritual body and there is a natural body,’ and the atmosphere of the first is always around your work, always full of help for all who can discern it.

“I am not an art connoisseur and should never dare express my opinion ‘as one having authority,’ but I do love beauty, and some of your beautiful woodland scenes, some ferns or mosses or flowers or birds have power to give ‘thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’ You reveal Nature’s very soul and as a most ardent worshipper of Nature and as a child of the Heavenly Father whose thoughts you have so often interpreted, I want to thank you.

“May you have many long years to continue making the world happier, and may you receive as much sunshine in your own life as you have given others.

“Yours most sincerely,
“Mary Sawyer.”

The other letter is from his pastor:

. . . . . .

“To me you are an interpreter of a word of God which is both older and newer than the one to the interpretation of which I have given my life. You have enabled a vaster congregation than any minister ever speaks to, to see in it a meaning before unseen, if not unsuspected. I am one of your congregation and I am your debtor for lessons, not merely of beauty, but of truth and purity, which cannot be put into words. In interpreting Nature you bring us nearer to God and the eternal beauty and goodness. For this, no less than for the autograph which hangs on our walls Mrs. Abbott and I heartily thank you.

“Yours sincerely,
Lyman Abbott.

“70 Columbia Heights,
7 April, 1888.”

Gibson was a warm partisan of water-color as a medium of artistic expression. He believed thoroughly in the possibilities of that mode of painting, which, it will be noted, was by no means understood or well-developed in this country when he was beginning to paint. His views in reference to it are well set forth in a letter to his mother, describing his first picture for the Water Color Society’s exhibition, written in the winter of 1874. He says:

“I am at present busily engaged on my water-color painting for the coming Spring exhibition. It is only just under way, but all who have seen it express much pleasure and enthusiasm at it and particularly admire my selection of a subject. It would be difficult to find a subject calculated to create such popular favor, and you know that a good selection in this particular is ‘half the battle.’ The idea is this: Subject, a ‘Struggle for Life.’ It is indicated by an old, old tree (an oak if you please) growing under all possible disadvantages, and besieged with a host of parasitic growths which threaten to sap its vitality and hasten its death. The trunk and main portion of a few branches only are shown and but one or two of them are possessed of any leafage. The near portion is devoid of bark and the exposed wood, by the action of the weather without and decay within, has become stained and broken. The interior is hollow, and the rich brown debris of its decomposing wood falls through a large irregular opening at the base of the trunk, and then spreading itself on a moss and lichen covered rock becomes the prey to brilliantly colored fungi and mother to many ferns. The tree is supposed to have started life near a rock and in the course of time its roots have grown over its surface and again by the action of time and other causes are now bare of bark and some of them dead. Higher in the tree, an unsightly gaping hollow presents itself, left after the fall of some dead and useless limb and this, collecting the rain water from each successive shower, has caused the gradual undermining of the tree and hurried it to its approaching death. Close beneath this opening, true to nature, sapping what little life blood still circulates in the part clings a luxuriant clump of the deadly agaric (touch wood) which may so often be seen on trees that have passed their better days. These are not all the burdens under which this aged subject is struggling. The mistletoe has fastened itself upon its only living branch, and parasitic vines innumerable clamber up and surround the trunk in their ‘deadly embrace.’ A brightly colored woodpecker has just alighted on the dying tree and finds food in plenty in the substance of decay. The whole picture is intended to suggest the idea of a struggle, and I know that I can make it so plain that anyone will realize my intention. A little pool of rain water lies at the foot of the rock and touching the roots which will give an additional effect of reflection, and what with this, the warm coloring of dried fallen leaves relieved by a group of delicate ferns, and other like growths, together with a strong play of sunlight on the whole, I see no reason why the picture should not be a good success and feel equal to rendering all that my imagination suggests and pictures. I have only just commenced, but enough is even now suggested to insure an at least attractive result. I have selected the medium of water-color because I believe that more can be done with that than most people are aware. I can work faster with water-color and secure just as brilliant effect as I could in oils. People in general do not know how much can be done with water-color, and I hope that I may live to show them.”

Six years later, coming back to the same subject in a letter to Colonel Gibson, he defends water-color as a medium in the following hearty fashion:

“Concerning the ‘water-color’ subject, on which you say ‘Of course water-color painting is not or cannot be high art, because it concerns itself too much with detail’ (not verbatim but embodying your

The Struggle for Life

First Watercolor

expressed idea), I regret that a man in your position should decline from the standard to which his namesake had elevated him, and come down to such a statement as that. Color is color, whether it is mixed with water or oil, and you can make a broad flat tint in oil-color or water-color just as you choose. There is no reason why one should use ‘one-hair brushes’ in water-color painting either. Neither is there any reason why he should paint more detail in the one than in the other. You should have had one glimpse of the last W. C. Ex. It would have made you open your eyes. I never saw stronger or broader pictures in oil than some that were in that exhibit. Neither does the medium make a snap of difference, excepting so far as it cramps the hand that wields it. The talk about ‘body color’ is a ‘hobby horse’ for art critics to ride on when they get ‘run out’ of their vocabulary. I use both, so do several others, some to such an excess as to abuse it and spoil the result. It should not be used to tell as paint, but to express texture or relief in an object where such qualities are important requisites.”

His own work in this medium showed the same steady and constant improvement as his work with the pencil. He toiled incessantly, and with his toil his power and facility grew. Remembering that he was self-taught in all his art-work; that he wholly lacked the training of the schools; that all his studies had to be made in the rush and under the pressure of his intensely busy life; yet that all of these studies were good enough to have a market value, and to take rank as works of art, his professional career is indeed a marvelous one. It was soon apparent that he was to take his place among the leading workers in color, and in an astonishingly short time he was recognized as one of the first water-colorists in America. He brought the same dash and fervor and sincerity to the color-box that he bestowed upon monotone. He was as ambitious to excel in this field as in his earlier one. He overcame heavy odds, chief among which was a popular prejudice that a man who does one thing well cannot do anything else. The public had come to rank him as a master in illustration. It was not readily converted to the notion that he might take as good a position in color-work. The critics talked, as critics will, in much this strain. “He is not a colorist,” said one. “His best work is in monotone,” said another. “He has won more admirers by his black-and-white work than he ever will win as a water-colorist,” wrote a third. They evidently had not heard the tale of his early attempts, and had not the fear of his caricatures before them. Gibson lived to confute their judgment and to prove his power as a colorist. That he had the root of the matter in him, and that he was qualified by temperament to see and feel the power of nature’s glowing hues he shows in a few lines of revelation, written out of his inmost spirit.

“How many beautiful pictures have I seen emerge from a cloud of dust upon a country road! How many of those pictures have again been half obliterated by the dust of after-years, only to be recalled to life by even so trivial a thing as the bleating of a lamb, the ring of a boyish laugh, or the homely music of the falling pasture bars!

“Pity for him whose heart knows no such sensitive and latent chord of sympathy to yield its harmony along the way, lending an inspiration to the present, while sanctifying the past, and drawing from its better memories a renewed delight in living! There is no walk in life, however dull or prosaic, no circumstance so commonplace, that they can stifle this ever-present melody. It sings in unison with nature in a thousand different keys—in a falling leaf or a cricket’s song. The rain-drops of to-day but repeat the old-time patter on the garret-roof. The noisy katydid, whenever heard, is that same untiring nightly visitant outside your window to whose perpetual whim you loved to listen, and in fancy tantalize until you dropped off to sleep upon your pillow. This skimming swallow sailing near will never cross your path but so surely will he fly to those same old nests beneath the barn-yard eaves. If there is ever a blessed mood ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ it may be found beneath the refining influence of just such reminiscences; for whether or not there are added elements of home association, there are always a legion of indelible memories that love to linger along the country road and lane—highways and byways beloved of fancy—paths of recollection filled with footprints which not even the tempest can obliterate.”

One rarely finds a profounder analysis of the true mean between breadth and detail, between effect and incident, nor a truer affirmation of one of the neglected sources of power in translating the larger aspects of the world than in the following:

“‘There is as much finish in the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them.’

“Here is a key to the very heart of nature, if one will only use it. And I would but add my faint echo in an entreaty for a deeper sense of the infinity of nature’s living tone and palpitating color—a plea for the more intelligent recognition of the elements that yield the tint which we vainly strive to imitate upon the canvas. Such knowledge will give a voice to every pigment on the palette, and to the brush an answering consciousness; for, whether disciple of a school or not, whether artist, poet, or layman, who can deny that such an attitude toward nature shall yield a harvest of deeper knowledge, and increased delight, not merely in the contemplation of the footprint, but even as truly in the study of the limitless panorama?

“Is there not to me an added charm in the pink flush that mantles the side of yonder mountain-spur when I know so well that it is shed by the myriads of blossoms in an acre of glowing fire-weed? And as my eye follows the cool cloud-shadow as it glides down upon the mountain-slope, among the varied patchwork of its fields and farms, is there not a deepened significance imparted to every separate tint that tells me something of its being?

“If in the faint yellow checkered forms I see fields of billowing wheat and barley, and recall a hundred of their associations, or if from that quaintly-dotted patch there comes a whiff from a sweet-scented field, with its cocks of new-mown hay, its skimming swallows and ringing scythes, with here a luminous gray of sandy meadow fresh from the plough or harrow, and there a weed-grown copse lit up with golden-rod; if that kaleidoscopic medley of grays and olives and browns tells me of its pastures, with their tinkling bells, of its fragrant beds of everlasting, ferns, and hardhack, its trailing junipers and its moss-flecked bowlders, and each of these in turn draws me still closer, and whispers something of itself—the everlasting with its pendent jewel, the orchis with its little confidant and nursling, the gentian with its close-kept secret and its never-opened eye; if yonder bluish bloom means a field of blueberries to me, and that snowy sweep brings visions of the blossoming buckwheat field, with its symphony of humming bees—tell me, have I not only seen the mountain-slope, but have I not also heard its voice?

Such a man could not keep out of the field of color. The feeling in him had to express itself. He must interpret on the canvas what he saw upon the hillside. It was inevitable that he should soon win as hearty praise for his color as he had for his drawing. Of course, the reputation could not be as wide as that he had achieved as illustrator in black and white. Fewer eyes could see his paintings than had been regaled with his illustrations. But when he laid down his brush, to paint no more, he had made a name for himself as one of the foremost American water-colorists.

It is but fair to say that his later experiences taught him a larger respect for “oil” as a medium of artistic expression. He was so eager to enlarge his field of work that he could not but venture upon experiments which brought to him a new sense of power and a knowledge of resources hitherto untouched. A few brief entries in his journal show his state of mind, and his prompt surrender of former prejudices. In March, 1881, he wrote:

“Painting for three weeks on oil-pictures for Academy Exhibition. First attempts in oil for exhibition. Trouble with medium. Final triumph of mind over matter. Painted a week or more on large autumn study commenced at Williamstown. Grew frantic and in a moment of frenzy took a piece of pasteboard and palette-knife and produced strongest picture I ever painted, in less than fifteen minutes,—a revelation which gave me confidence. A victorious fight with an oil-tube which had threatened to get the better of me.”

A few days later he tried a similar study, with which he was even more satisfied. In another entry he says of this attempt:

“Much pleased with effect of sky I carried picture to a finish by four o’clock. Went out and ordered frame for it. A Diaz effect,—quite strong. What a revelation to me who, ten days ago, was disgusted with oil-color as a medium! I am all aglow with enthusiasm at finding another medium for the expression of my thoughts and feelings.”

From this time forward he knew that there were still greater possibilities before him than he had realized, and with the knowledge came a fresh ambition, a stronger challenge to his artistic nature.

The “smoke-pictures” which he executed were one more example of his versatility and delight in new and daring methods. He did a great many of them, and they attracted much attention. They were, briefly, black-and-white pictures made by a gas flame upon a cardboard or paper ground. In his first experiments he held the paper before a horizontal flame and by passing one part after another across the flame, secured masses of lamp-black, which he found he could manipulate to great advantage. Landscape, cloud-effects, deep shadows of night or storm were easily within reach. Afterward he attached a rubber tube to his gas-fixture, and with a suitable nozzle was able to sit at his easel and manipulate the pipe as he would a brush. After the paper was well coated with varying shades of gray and black, he would work up the picture with brush or finger or palette-knife, deepening the tones, when desirable, by more smoke, lightening them by scraping and rubbing. The total effect was broad, yet marked by gradations so fine as to be almost beyond the reach of ordinary methods of black-and-white work; while the rich, velvety textures were of a depth quite remarkable. Though he never devised any method of “fixing” the smoke, yet after the lapse of a dozen years, these pictures, when preserved under glass, have kept all their original brilliancy and force.

But all that Gibson had done in his artistic career was to him only an apprenticeship. He meant more than he achieved. He was on the way to better things, when death stayed his feet. With all his tremendous intensity, his restless industry, his fulness of conception and scheme, he was yet a man of undreamed-of patience. He saw far ahead of what he had reached, and planned for it, and meant to attain it. He himself regarded all that he had done in black and white, in water-color, even his beginnings in oil, as only the preparation for a larger, stronger art, in which he should interpret the spiritual side of Nature. There was always before his mind a dream of the subtler phases of natural beauty, the deeper meaning she conveys to the listening soul. He was feeling, with more and more force every day that he lived, the spell of

“The light that never was on sea or land,
The consecration and the poet’s dream,”

and the passion grew within him to paint, in the most permanent and adequate medium, the things he was coming to feel and to see. Art was really his goal. Painting was his crowning ambition. His own view of his life was that he had but just fitted himself for a worthier task, that he was just ready to begin the work to which he was called.

CHAPTER V
THE OPEN EYE

WE have seen how the passion for the study of nature was born with Gibson, and grew with his growth. He was a naturalist by nature; and all his training strengthened in him the passion which made the young boy, with a “Cecropia” in sight, “feel like an eagle darting at her prey.” The natural world was to him a perpetual attraction, a land to be explored, a mystery to be searched, a delight to be enjoyed. The frontispiece to his chapter “Across Lots” in “Highways and Byways” represents an upland shrubby pasture, beyond whose limits gleam the waters of a pond, backed by a round-topped hill. In the foreground stretches a rail fence, with a gateway whose bars are dropped; and this open pathway to the wild fields and waters he has suggestively entitled “An Invitation.” That invitation was continually pressing upon him. He always felt it, outweighing all other calls, summoning him from every other career, bidding him take to the fields and the woods and the hills, to listen, to see, to learn, and to impart. In 1867, when he was a boy of seventeen, convalescing from a severe illness, he wrote to a dear friend:

“Cypripedium Acaule”

(“My Studio Neighbors”)
Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers

“You ask me what I do all day. This question is very easily answered. It is the same thing over and over again day after day. The great part of the time I spend in the woods, alone. I start off about ten o’clock in the morning and ramble through the woods and thickets. There is one spot in particular which I frequent the most, because there are two wood-thrushes which invariably come and sing to me. This spot is a singular little dell. It is situated in front of a precipice two hundred feet high, in among ferns and large rocks which are shaded by hemlock trees. It is on these trees that the wood-thrushes sit and chant their songs by the hour. Oh, I do not believe I could be happy if this pleasure were taken away from me. I am always happy alone in the woods. I dare say I am destined to spend half my life in just such places. This is the daily program of the way I spend my time. Silly isn’t it? But I can’t help it. It is my nature to enjoy nature, and I mean to do it at every opportunity.” That outburst struck the keynote of Gibson’s life and spirit.

But his love of nature, like his knowledge of it, was broad and catholic. He was not a specialist in any narrow or pedantic sense. He was botanist, ornithologist, entomologist, biologist, all in one. A butterfly had as much interest for him as an evening-primrose, a chipmunk as a nuthatch. Everything was grist that came to his mill. Nothing could better illustrate this universal love of all living things, than a note which he left, on which he intended evidently to base a sketch. Imperfect as it is, it is an admirable illustration of his method and of his broad sympathy and interest. He begins with several experiments at a title, and then outlines his plan; after which he enumerates the “available episodes,” as he calls them, to fill the outline:

“‘A Rare Day with the Speckled Trout. Speckled Beauties. A Rare Day’s Trouting.’ See Burroughs’s ‘Speckled Trout,’ Prime’s ‘I go a-Fishing,’ Isaak Walton.

“Begin: It was the 29th of June. A glimpse of a large platter of speckled trout, a one day’s catch displayed with pride by a neighbor, revived my old-time zeal and reminded me that there was but one day left in which to beat the record. I consequently start off fully equipped, and meet with an interesting train of episodes, and an accumulation of a basket of specimens,—plants, insects, bird’s nests. Following the course of the stream, the incidents are such as are perfectly appropriate to this setting and the season. A trout occasionally alluded to, as an accessory, jumping, etc.

“Or begin with quotation about ‘Not even a minister is to be trusted on the subject of fish.’ Fish stories. I have one to tell which however it may compare with others has at least the merit of truth. It is true that I once caught forty-nine trout, within an hour; but that was not a circumstance to the fortune which has often since befallen me. My last is a fair sample of these lucky days.

“End something in this vein,—after an enumeration of natural beauties: And, by the way, the trout? There in the rippling pools; for I left them all there! And yet there are those who would have followed my trail, and have brought home nothing but a basketful of dead fish. Finish with some apt quotation or quaint proverb, of how one went and brought back chaff, and another fetched the kernel.”

It is plain that such a man as this did not love Nature for the sake of the contribution she made to his particular sport or his favorite study. He was one of that class whom Professor John Van Dyke has in mind, in entitling a certain book of his “Nature for Its Own Sake.” He was out after anything that mother Nature vouchsafed to put in his way, and he gathered up reverently whatever he found, as something good for him because it came from her. Witness a single incident in which he modestly attributes to fortune what was quite as much due to his own habitual alertness.

“By a fortunate train of weather conditions I was once favored with a phenomenon by which almost the entire vegetable bill of fare of the winter birds, at least in the way of seeds, was spread out before me—brought to my feet, as it were.

“Walking upon the firm and polished snow-crust, picking my way along a rail-fence at the foot of a steep, sloping pasture, I suddenly aroused into flight a flock of small birds from behind the bulwark of drifts with which the fence was hemmed in and partially buried. So loud was the united flutter of their wings that it at first suggested the whir of a partridge, until I saw it dissipated in the flock of smaller fry above the edge of the drift. They proved to be, as I remember, mostly snowbirds, white buntings, and goldfinches, though doubtless the cedar-birds, winter-wrens, tree-sparrows, pine and purple finches, were also among them. Their noisy flight was the signal for a general alarm all along the line, following the fence for several hundred feet, each zigzag corner sending up its winged bevy to perch and twitter upon the upper rails. Almost every projecting beam showed its chirruping sentinel.

“Interested to discover the secret of such a great feathery convocation, I crept up to the edge of the slippery drift and looked over. Beyond the fence rose the steep, white, glistening slope of the pasture, a distance of a furlong or more, its surface mottled with its brown withered vegetation. Following the rambling rails on either side were drifts of the most fantastic form, now and then almost peering above the fence riders, and between them ran a winding valley, in which the old fence seemed to be walking knee-deep in snow. It needed only a second glance into this hollow, whence the startled flocks had flown, to understand its attractiveness for the birds. Its depths were fairly littered with the choicest kind of allurement. The very cream of the pasture had flowed into this trough. It was the hopper which had received the entire wind-blown tribute of the weedy upland that looked down upon it, and of the overhanging woods far up the slope. Here were wind-rows of various seeds which had been dislodged from the weeds and trees and blown along the glassy snow to be caught in this convenient bin. The small goblet-shaped hollows around the projecting grass-stems were full to the brim with their good cheer, and the deeper vales and gullies were marked out everywhere by their brown meandering lines of intermingled chaff and seeds, often to the depth of two inches or more. A happy valley and a land of plenty, surely!

“A single handful of this grist taken up at random presented a surprising variety of elements, offering a wide choice for the most fastidious bird appetite. Curious to test this question further, I followed the fence for a long distance, occasionally sampling the meadow crumbs, and continually discovering some new ingredient of fruit or seed.

“Even the powdery chaff which I blew away in order to better reveal the larger morsels, proved to be the fine seed of various grasses and sedges; while among the more conspicuous which remained I noted the following considerable list, not to mention others which were then beyond my limited botanical knowledge. The seeds of the alder, birch, hemlock, ragweed, bur-marigold, and wild-carrot, were, perhaps, the most numerous and general. There was an exclusive colony of dried grapes assembled in one particular corner, doubtless laying their plans for a future arborescent monopoly of the rails in their vicinity. I found, also, numbers of larch seeds, both with and without their wings. Stag-horn-sumach, poison-ivy, ash, and hop-hornbeam representatives were frequent, and one chaffy handful, downy with goldenrod and aster seeds was lit up with a bright scarlet berry of black alder, like a tiny live coal in a bed of ashes. There was an occasional withered poke-berry to be met with, also fruits of sheep-berry, ampelopsis, juniper, and hawthorn. Another sample challenged my audacious familiarity with the fangs of a Cenchrus bur—the spiny fruit of the hedgehog grass, and still another was pretty well doctored with the poisonous seeds of stramonium, or jimson-weed, a line of which followed along the base of a drift like an open trail fuse of blasting powder leading up to a drill hole well calked with chaff. I recall also a few samaras of the tulip-tree, some hazel-nuts, oats, foxtail-grass seed, as well as several other queer diminutive forms which were unknown to me at the time, and which I cannot now identify from memory.”

If we were to name the quality most characteristic of his work as a naturalist, it would be his habit of close and accurate observation. He saw more of the objects and incidents of the natural world in a square rod, than most men, even fairly observant, would see in a square mile. His books are a mass of evidence of the minuteness and the accuracy of his observations; and his note-books tell with still greater force the story of his patience and industry in preparing himself to report what he had seen. They show that he looked and saw for himself, and that his stories of plant and insect life are genuine studies, at first hand. A fine instance of the personal observation and actual experience which lay behind his work is afforded in the case of the chapter upon the “Bombardier-Beetle” in “Sharp Eyes.” It is but a brief sketch, and reports only a curious performance on the part of a rather rare insect. But the observed facts on which it is based are set down in a record almost as long as the sketch itself, and in a manner to show the foundation of close attention and scrutiny to which he was continually subjecting the face of the earth. He writes under date of September 28th, at Williamstown, Massachusetts. The note begins with a memorandum to the effect that he carried his camera, with four plates, and that he observed tumble-bugs, ichneumon flies, and dung beetles. “In turning over a large stone, as is my habit in my walks, I discerned beneath it a little beetle which I at first supposed to be the common species, so closely resembling the Bombardier beetle of Europe. I had no special desire to capture it, and as it escaped beneath the grass and debris, my attention was arrested by a series of queer detonations, which made me suspect that some kind of a toad lay concealed near by. As I rummaged among the leaves I heard the queer report right at my fingers’ ends, and at the same time noticed a tiny cloud of smoke emerging from the same quarter. The fact then dawned upon me that perhaps I had discovered a genuine Bombardier. A moment’s search revealed the little fellow, and he discharged his battery six times or so. I captured him. I have not yet read of this species having been discovered in America. And certainly the allied species of this country possess no such detonating power. Before the detonation the body of the beetle would swell considerably. I kept the beetle and several of its allied species in a box some weeks afterward, and observed the explosion several times. Mrs. Gibson also heard it once and distinctly saw the small cloud of smoke of the volatile fluid. About two days after the capture of the Bombardier, I espied a beetle crawling on the floor of my room, and thinking that my pet had escaped I captured the insect. It proved to be another of the same species, but evidently of the other sex, and it was undoubtedly seeking for its imprisoned mate. There are numerous parallel instances in my own experience, but in this instance it is especially remarkable that I should find a second individual of a species so rare in America that I had never been able to find one before; and although I overturned at least a thousand stones during my stay in Williamstown, I was never able to discover another specimen.”

A few weeks earlier in the same summer, he recorded another incident which shows his alertness of eye and the success with which it was constantly rewarded. He was on a trip to South Amboy, to study orchids in a conservatory there. He wrote:

“In a ramble near the station I found (as usual) exactly what I had started out to hunt for, a large patch of milkweed. This luck is an every day experience with me and has long since ceased to be a surprise. Once let my vision be set on the qui-vive for any given object, and I am led to it as by some irresistible intuition. No matter whether the object sought be a four-leaved clover, a certain flower, a rare caterpillar, a gold-bug or a ‘walking-stick,’ I am soon rewarded. I was desirous of discovering a specimen of an insect laden with pollen of milkweed. In less than ten minutes I found a large tract of pollen, in full bloom. In an instant more I detected a beautiful Cetonia beetle, nestling in a tuft of blossoms. Soon there came a small yellow hornet, which I captured. Its legs were fringed with the pollen-masses. So were the toes of the beetle.”

Probably Gibson explains his own success in a sentence or two in one of his own chapters: “Anticipation is an equipment, the surest talisman to discovery, and anticipation may be quickened, either by pictorial hint or previous experience. The retina must be on the alert.” That certainly was true of his own eye, and the fact that he was such an enthusiastic seeker accounts in large measure for the fact that he was such a successful finder.

His notebooks show the broad scope of his observations and of his studies. They cover every corner of natural life. One day he would go out and bring back material for pages of memoranda concerning the chase of what he believed to be a hermit thrush. On another day he makes an entry of fourteen varieties of golden-rod analyzed, six kinds of aster, and, as he adds, “many others.” One page of his notes gives the results of careful experiments with three dozen dandelion blossoms, to determine how long the flower requires to pass from bud to the state when it floats away in silvery down. Another passage records in a minute description his first observation of the snapping of the witch-hazel seeds, to which he adds a list of a dozen subjects for illustration. He counts the number of different plants he finds in his city back-yard. He sets down the things seen in a walk through the Park with a lantern, from nine o’clock to eleven at night. He notes that on a certain June 29th, in the midst of a heavy thunder storm he heard the song of the Wilson thrush in the woods near his house. He makes liberal memoranda of the things most touching his attention after a fresh snow-fall. He sets down a list of more than a score of birds whose song he heard “in a continuous roundel,” while sitting on his porch on a quiet Sunday. Thoreau in his hermit haunts at Walden was not more minute and attentive in his observations than this eager three-fold worker, hurrying from city to country and back to city again, equally busy at sketching, and writing, and observing. There are pages upon pages of his notes which read like the “Natural History of Selborne” in their detailed and leisurely narrative of things seen and heard in the fields and beside the brooks. In these records of his intermittent life in the country one never hears the faintest echo of the bustling round of the dweller in cities. He drops all that when he locks the door of his town-house behind him. Once in the open air he is again the free and buoyant youth, preoccupied only by the purposes and the pursuits which belong to the open air, the meadow, and the wood. Indeed it seems as if his early training and experiences, those school-days at the “Gunnery,” the passions there born, the habits there fostered and confirmed, lay at the basis of all his life afield. He himself somewhere said: “To the average observer, if the eye is ever thus to be a means of grace, it must store up its harvest while hearts are light and life is new, when eyes are bright and undimmed. How many a prisoner caged in city walls is living on the harvest stored in free, unburdened youth, which has never been replenished.” Perhaps that was true of this observer so much above the “average,” and caught for half his time in the city’s durance.

But even there he proved again the truth of Lovelace’s lines:

“Stone walls do not a prison make
Nor iron bars a cage.”

He made the city rural, and told others his secret:

“How little do we appreciate our opportunities for natural observation! Even under the most apparently discouraging and commonplace environment, what a neglected harvest! A back-yard city grass-plot, forsooth, what an invitation! Yet there is one interrogation to which the local naturalist is continually called to respond. If perchance he dwells in Connecticut, how repeatedly is he asked, ‘Don’t you find your particular locality in Connecticut a specially rich field for natural observation?’ The botanist of New Jersey or the ornithologist of Esopus-on-Hudson is expected to give an affirmative reply to similar questions