“Whew! Talk of letters! Don’t you ever say another word about your letters. A page of your handwriting acts like a talisman that conjures up a host of reminiscences, and sets my pen and thoughts going like a saw mill; and here it is six o’clock, and my wife told me to be home by that time, as we are both going to call upon Mrs. Gunn this evening by appointment. Gracious! and only to think that I haven’t got a moment to spare to dot my i’s and cross my t’s, nor send it to the binders. I hope you will be able to make it all out. I’ll page it for you anyhow.
“Good bye, with much love from
“Your old boy
“W. Hamilton Gibson.
“Alias Willie.”
The chief sources of the interest of his literary work appear in those lines. He had something to say; and he said it in his own way. There are no better recipes than those for concocting a lasting success in literature.
His style was, like all good style, the outcome of his spirit. He had a marvelous power of telling because he had such exceptional power of seeing. In the passage describing the night stroll in the woods, he fills the mind with the mystery of the outward scene, and makes it seem, without any sense of undue artifice, just the setting for the mysterious transaction which ensues between the primrose and the moth.
“Our misty primrose dell is fast lighting its pale lamps in the twilight. One by one they flash out in the gloom as if obedient to the hovering touch of some Ariel unseen—or is it the bright response to the firefly’s flitting torch? The sun has long sunk beneath the hill. And now, when the impenetrable dusk has deepened round about, involving all, where but a moment since all was visible, this shadowy dell has forgotten the sunset, and knows a twilight all its own, independent of the fading glow of the sky. It was a sleepy nook by day, where it is now all life and vigilance; it was dark and still at noon, where it is now bright and murmurous. The ‘delicious secret’ is now whispered abroad, and where in all the mystic alchemy of odors or attars shall you find such a witching fragrance as this which is here borne on the diaphanous tide of the jealous gliding mist, and fills the air with its sweet enchantment—the stilly night’s own spirit guised in perfume? Yonder bright cluster, deep within the recess of the alders, how it glows! fanned by numerous feathery wings, it glimmers in the dark like a phosphorescent aureole—verily as though some merry will-o’-the-wisp, tired of his dancing, had perched him there, while other luminous spires rise above the mist, or here and there hover in lambent banks beyond, or, like those throbbing fires beneath the ocean surge, illume the fog with half-smothered halo. This lustrous tuft at our elbow! Let us turn our lantern upon it. Its nightly whorl of lamps is already lit, save one or two that have escaped our fairy in his rounds, but not for long, for the green veil of this sunset bud is now rent from base to tip. The confined folded petals are pressing hard for their release. In a moment more, with an audible impulse, the green apex bursts asunder, and the four freed sepals slowly reflex against the hollow tube of the flower, while the lustrous corolla shakes out its folds, saluting the air with its virgin breath.
“The slender stamens now explore the gloom, and hang their festoons of webby pollen across their tips. None too soon, for even now a silvery moth circles about the blossom, and settles among the outstretched filaments, sipping the nectar in tremulous content. But he carries a precious token as he hies away, a golden necklace, perhaps, and with it a message to yonder blossom among the alders, and thus until the dawn, his rounds directed with a deep design of which he is an innocent instrument, but which insures a perpetual paradise of primroses for future sippers like himself.”
The reader feels the pure delight he takes in the beauty of bird-and flower-forms; and there is no stinting of phrases in his determination to convey some sense of them to those who, “having eyes, see not.” He is as accurate as Audubon and as poetic as Lowell in his description of the rose-breasted grosbeak and his rich song.
“Hark, from the apple-tree in the field below, that note so full and ripe and mellow! ‘A robin,’ say you? No; nor an oriole. There is a distinct individuality in that song, which, while suggesting both these birds, still differentiates it in many respects as the superior to either, as though from a fuller throat, a more ample vocal source. It is one of the rarest, choicest voices among all our feathered songsters, in timbre and volume surpassing the thrush, and in these qualities unequaled, I think, by any of our birds. Listen to the overflowing measure of its melody! How comparatively few the notes, and yet how telling!—no single tone lost, no superficial intricacies. Sensuous, and suffused with color, it is like a rich, pulpy, luscious, pink-cheeked tropic fruit rendered into sound. Such would seem the irresistible figure as I listen with closed eyes to the swelling notes—a figure entirely independent of, though certainly sustained in, the ornithological form pictured in the song, sitting quietly on an upper twig, with full plump breast as carmine-cheeked as the autumn apples now promised in the swelling blossom calyxes among which it so quietly nestles. I can see the jetty head, and quills splashed with silvery white, and the intervals of song seem spanned with rosy light as pure as the prism released from those upraised wings as the singer preens his plumage with ivory bill. This is the rose-breasted grosbeak, with his overflowing cup, his pastoral cornucopia, his musical horn of plenty.”