“Many years ago it was my good fortune to be present in Westminster Chapter House at a meeting to open a fund for a memorial to Dean Stanley. Among the speakers was James Russell Lowell, then our minister at St. James’s, and he referred to an epitaph in a Boston churchyard as descriptive of Dean Stanley’s character. That epitaph was simply, ‘He was so pleasant.’ Many times have I reflected how well that idea described one large side of Gibson’s nature. ‘He was so pleasant,’ so jocund, so genial, so appreciative of humor. One outward token of the trait familiar to us all was his quick grasp of the funny things to be found in this rural New England of ours. We know--and by ‘we’ I mean especially those of us in middle life or beyond--what a wealth of oddity in phrase and habit our country New Englanders have amassed. Time was when each Yankee village had its quaint and curious characters, but now, with education and contact with the world, they are dying away, and the next generation will see few or none save as they survive in literature. In personal forms Gibson rescued from oblivion many of those characters who went into his books, but the draft was small on his collection of Yankee epigram and oddity which never reached the types. I can see him in memory now, with his rich gift of mimicry, repeating the bucolic joke, or, may be, in smiling silence listening at the post-office as the country sage expounds his original views from the bema of the barrel-head. “Of Gibson’s sweet home life, of his love of wife and family, of his kind hospitality, of his sacred personal friendships, it is not for me to speak in detail here. Suffice it to say that they rounded out with rare and beautiful symmetry that splendid life of his as artist, writer, prose-poet, investigator, good citizen, and _man_. In this village of his love, so endeared to him as summer home, and from which, as a Gunnery boy, he drew so much of moral inspiration and strength, no vain words of mine need voice him, nor can language of tongue or pen measure the void which he has left behind. Washington, indeed, is not the same with Gibson gone, and has but the sad boon of still clasping him, mother-like, on the green slope which looks off to the valley of the sunset shadows which he loved so well. We miss, yet meet him, in every nook, in the waving tree-tops, the swaying flower by the rippling stream, in the butterfly that flits by in the sunlight. How well with trifling verbal change do those lines of Whittier fit our loss: “‘But still we wait with ear and eye For something gone which should be nigh, A loss in all familiar things, In flower that blooms and bird that sings. * * * * *