The Heart of the White Mountains, Their Legend and Scenery / Tourist's Edition

by Samuel Adams Drake

“PASTORAL DAYS;

OR,

MEMORIES OF A NEW ENGLAND YEAR.”

By W. HAMILTON GIBSON.

4to, Illuminated Cloth, Gilt Edges, $7 50.

FROM “THE TIMES,” LONDON.

The title of this very beautifully illustrated book conveys but a very faint idea of its merits, which lie, not in the descriptions of the varied beauties of the fields and fens of New England, but in the admirable wood-engravings, which on every page picture far more than could be given in words. The author has the rare gift of feeling for the exquisitely graceful forms of plant life and the fine touch of an expert draughtsman, which enables him both to select and to draw with a refinement which few artists in this direction have ever shown. Besides these essential qualities in a painter from nature, Mr. Gibson has a fine sense of the poetic and picturesque in landscape, of which there are many charming pieces in this volume, interesting in themselves as pictures, and singularly so in their resemblance to the scenery of Old England. Most of the little vignette-like views might be mistaken for Birket Foster’s thoroughly English pictures, and some are like Old Crome’s vigorous idyls. One of the most striking—a wild forest scene with a storm passing, called “The Line Storm”—is quite remarkable in the excellent drawing of the trees swept by the gale and in the general composition of the picture, which is full of the true poetic conception of grandeur in landscape beauty. But all Mr. Gibsons’s good drawing would have been nothing unless he had been so ably aided by the artist engravers, who have throughout worked with such sympathy with his taste, and so much regard for the native grace of wild flowers, grasses, ferns, insects, and all the infinite beauties of the fields, down to the mysterious spider and his silky net spread over the brambles. These cuts are exceptional examples of beautiful work. Nothing in the whole round of wood-engraving can surpass, if it has even equalled, these in delicacy as well as breadth of effect. Much as our English cutters pride themselves on belonging to the school which Bewick and Jackson founded, they must certainly come to these American artists to learn the something more which is to be found in their works. In point of printing, too, there is much to be learned in the extremely fine ink and paper, which, although subjected to “hot-pressing,” are evidently adapted in some special condition for wood-printing. The printing is obviously by hand-press,[46] and in the arrangement of the type with the cuts on each page the greatest ingenuity and invention are displayed. This, too, has been designed with a sort of a Japanesque fancy; here is a tangled mass of grasses and weeds, with a party of ants stealing out of the shade, and there the dragon-flies flit across among the blossoms of the reeds, or the feathery seeds of the dandelion float on the page. Each section of the seasons has its suggestive picture: Springtime, with a flight of birds under a may-flower branch that hangs across the brook: Summer, a host of butterflies sporting round the wild rose: Autumn, with the swallows flying south and falling leaves that strew the page; while for Winter the chrysalis hangs in the leafless bough, and the snow-clad graves in the village church-yard tell the same story of sleep and awakening. As many as thirty different artists, besides the author and designer, have assisted in producing this very tastefully illustrated volume, which commends itself by its genuine artistic merits to all lovers of the picturesque and the natural.

FROM “THE SATURDAY REVIEW,” LONDON.

This pleasant American book has brought to our remembrance, though without any sense of imitation, two old-fashioned favorites. In the first place, its descriptions of rural humanity, its rustic sweetness and humor, have a certain analogy with the delicately pencilled studies of life in Miss Mitford’s “Our Village;” but the relation it bears to the second book is much closer. It is more than forty years since Mr. P. H. Gosse published the first of those delightful sketches of animal life at home which have led so many of us with a wholesome purpose into the woods and lanes. It was in the Canadian Naturalist that he broke this new ground; and though we do not think this has ever been one of his best-known books, we cannot but believe that there are still many readers who will be reminded of it as they glance down Mr. Gibson’s pages.