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| BY JOHN COLEMAN ADAMS |
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| NATURE STUDIES IN BERKSHIRE |
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|_Photogravure Edition_, with 16 illustrations |
| in photogravure. 8º $4.50 |
| |
| Popular Edition, illustrated 2.50 |
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| WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON |
| ARTIST--NATURALIST--AUTHOR |
| 8º. Fully illustrated. (By mail $2.15) net, $2.00 |
| |
| G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS |
| NEW YORK AND LONDON |
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[Illustration: _Frontispiece_
W. Hamilton Gibson]
[Illustration: _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
[Illustration]
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
CHAPTER PAGE
I. A FORTUNATE BOYHOOD 1
II. CALLING AND ELECTION 24
III. A QUICK SUCCESS 49
IV. WITH PENCIL AND BRUSH 81
V. THE OPEN EYE 108
VI. THE ACCIDENT OF AUTHORSHIP 139
VII. THE WORKMAN AND HIS WORK 166
VIII. THE PERSONAL SIDE 200
IX. AFTERGLOW 237
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON _Frontispiece_
Age, 41
TO FACE PAGE
THE GUNNERY 6
Washington, Connecticut
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON 18
Age, 13
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON 28
Age, 17
[A]THE ROAD TO HIDE-AND-SEEK TOWN 36
First Composition, 1873
WILLIAM HAMILTON GIBSON 42
Age, 23
[A]“THE PEACOCK’S FEATHER” (“THE PEERLESS
PLUME”) 48
(“Highways and Byways”)
Copyright, 1882, by Harper Brothers
[A]GOD’S MIRACLE 58
By permission of The Curtis Publishing Company
THE SUMACS 80
[A]PEN-AND-INK SKETCH 82
From a Letter
AT THE EASEL 90
Brooklyn Studio
[A]THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE 98
First Watercolor
[A]“CYPRIPEDIUM ACAULE” 108
(“My Studio Neighbors”)
Copyright, 1897, by Harper Brothers
[A]UPLAND MEADOWS 120
From a Painting
[A]“THE BOBOLINK AT HOME” 130
(“Strolls by Starlight”)
Copyright, 1890, by Harper Brothers
THE WRITING DESK 138
Brooklyn Studio
[A]A WINTER HUNT 144
[A]SPRINGTIME 154
From a Painting
[A]LAKE WARAMAUG 162
From a Painting
[A]“WIDE-AWAKE DAY-DOZERS” 178
(“Strolls by Starlight and Sunshine”)
Copyright, 1890, by Harper Brothers
[A]THE ROXBURY ROAD 188
[A]LATE OCTOBER 222
From a Painting
[A]THE EDGE OF THE WOODS 234
From a Painting
THE VILLAGE GREEN 240
Washington, Connecticut
GIBSON’S GRAVE 248
Washington Cemetery
THE BRONZE MEMORIAL 266
[A] 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
[Illustration: _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
[Illustration: _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.