“He walked, the friend of every life
In flower or insect, beast or bird;
He knew their pleasure and their strife
Their sorrows shared, their secrets heard.
“Bending their leafy diadems,
The trees to him a welcome breathed;
The blossoms on a thousand stems
To him their deepest hearts unsheathed.
“The bright-eyed squirrel showed him where
Its highway ran along the fence,
And, inly glad to see him there,
Fled, not too far, in shy pretence.
“The tilting songster on the bough,
The callow nestling in its place,
With quick perception learned to know
This lover of their hunted race.
“Around him, like an angel throng,
The countless host of gauzy things,
With airy flight and murmurous song
Unfurled the glories of their wings.
“For the world’s life within him thrilled;
And every earthly path he trod
To his responsive soul was filled
With works and ways and words of God.
“Then spake a dearer voice: ‘My son,
A life yet wider shalt thou see;
Leave these fair hills of Washington
And walk on fairer hills with Me!’
“Amen! So may we walk with God!”
Other tributes were no less appreciative, and may serve as side-lights upon his inner and personal life. They show how he impressed many men and many minds, in various and yet concurrent ways. Mr. Clarence Deming, speaking to the friends and graduates of the “Gunnery” school, emphasized the traits in which he was a type of the best forces inherited from his early training.
“And so to-night it is not Gibson the writer, Gibson the nature-lover and nature-hunter, and Gibson the artist, whom we should be recalling, so much as Gibson the man; and the thought persistently comes back to me over and over again that he was our greatest Gunnery boy, not merely in reputation before the world, not by virtue of pen and brush, but by the fact that he was the perfect and consummate product of the old Gunnery scheme of education, and a kind of analogue of Mr. Gunn himself. If there was one thing sought by Mr. Gunn most strenuously it was the seeding in a boy of those qualities which in him, as man, should fruit into that grandest trait expressed in the English tongue by the word character. It is a subtle term, hard to define and to expound. I can, perhaps, call it the power in man compounded by nerve force, habit, and conscience which makes him fearlessly righteous and sets him among his fellow-men in organized society as a living and forceful influence, ever active for things good.