William Hamilton Gibson: artist—naturalist—author

by John Coleman Adams

Springtime

From a Painting

learned it all. I have never met a man that knew so much of the real life of Nature as I know myself—and how did you come to see and hear it all? I remember it now that you recall it to me—I even thought one night in my bed, that I had detected a slip in your chronology. I thought you had delayed the flower which you euphoniously denominate the ‘Swamp Cabbage’ till too late a day. I looked in the morning in the Magazine and there it was promptly ready in the wild days of March. I venture to say that no poet has before been so true to nature as you have been. I thought no man except John Burroughs had seen or heard so much in the woods as I am wont to see; but lo! one of my own boys has seen with keener eyes, has heard with more acute ears, and has had genius and taste to tell it all in words, and to paint it all with a magic brush. Other men don’t know which most to admire in you, the artist or the naturalist. Well I don’t; but who before has described spring without a blunder? They draw a nightingale where I heard a whippoorwill, or they set Venus to glow in the east on a summer evening. I have not detected a slip. And what an old fool I was to keep pencils away from you, when you were born with a whole magazine of them. I cannot write. I ought not to have begun. I think ‘Spring’ by far the richer article of the two—full of the nicest touches both with pencil and with pen—and you are a dear good fellow, and so is your wife. God bless you both. Go and see Abbie at 36 Garden Place.

“Yours,
“F. W. Gunn.”

To this Gibson made speedy answer, giving full absolution and much more:

“Do not chide yourself for keeping the pencils from me, for it is not true. You never did—you tried, but gave it up. When you were wont to say every few minutes in school ‘Gibson, what are you doing?’ I used to answer, withdrawing my eyes from the window ‘Nothing, sir.’ You never dreamed of the true amount of thinking that was going on within my cranium. Lazy as I seemed to be, I was never idle in my mind and I can see now the flickering light and shade among the leaves of the old school-house maples—see the squirming caterpillar dangling from his silken thread, swinging in the summer breeze.

“The white-faced wasp upon the window-sill is as distinct to me now as if he crawled upon this paper. These and a thousand more I recall, and even the first glimpse of the first day of my happy life at Washington comes up before me with a freshness in decided contrast to the memories of the later years. You well remember ‘Amy’s Grotto’ in the pasture lot. You took me to see it and my eyes were wide open also in those early days. Little thing, as it was, it has impressed itself upon my memory as indelibly as anything in my entire life? I recall its every sprig of green and hear the tuneful drops in the limpid pool.

“Where then did I learn it all, except from your own dear self in the happiest season of my life? You it was who turned my thoughts towards nature, and inspired the desire in me to follow up the study. If I have lived to see the day when you are ‘proud of me’ or when I can in any way contribute to your pleasure as a meagre return for the many years of happiness you have given me, I have not lived in vain, for this very desire has been a factor in the ends and aims of my ambition.