And while in life’s late afternoon, Where cool and long the shadows grow, We walk to meet the night that soon Shall shape and shadow overflow, We cannot feel that thou art far, Since near at need the angels are; And when the sunset gates unbar, Shall we not see thee waiting stand, And, white against the evening star, The welcome of thy beckoning hand?’” President Almon Gunnison, of St. Lawrence University, speaking out of a long and intimate acquaintance in Brooklyn, wrote of him, a few weeks after his death: “There have been few men of larger manhood than this poet-artist, this seer and interpreter of nature. He was open-minded and trustful as a child. He loved everything that was manly, and his sense of right was an instinct and a passion. He was tolerant in faith and scorned all narrowness. Reverent, worshipful, a lover of God and man. Not since Gilbert White of Selborne died has there lived one who more minutely discerned nature, and never has there been one more dowried to interpret her. Thoreau had equal skill of vision and perhaps larger grace of literary expression. Burroughs has the same order of discernment, and a like art to make nature interpret her lessons in her own words. But Gibson was poet and artist too; he could sing the song of the daisy with almost the melody of Burns, and could with his deft pencil depict the highway of the squirrel so cleverly that one could hear the echoes of its steps, and picture the hues of the flowers so that one could almost smell the fragrance of their blossoms. He was the most versatile of men. He was a stranger to no form of art. With pencil and with brush, with every form of pigment, he was the master, and with the candle’s smoke he made weird pictures which startled admiration. He was skilled in every mechanical device. He had most curious charts with cunning contrivances, strings and pulleys, by which he illustrated the fertilization of plants, and would shoot the pollen and would have curious insects flying in the air, to show how nature provided for the perpetuation of her growths. His studio was a museum of the mechanics of art, and had he chosen he could have excelled in many lines of inventive skill. He loved Nature in all her variant moods and forms. There was no flower that he could not call by name, and not a weed held the secret of its life inviolate from him. He could answer ‘Yes’ to the poet’s question, ‘Canst thou name the birds without a gun?’; he could go into the forest and the birds would come at his caressing call; he could see into the very heart of every flower, and could write the flora of every State. He loved Nature, too, in her larger forms. The mountains awed and the sea thrilled him with their immensities. He could set the song of the brook to music, and write out the melody of rivers in his symphonies. How well do we remember his telling us of the book which he would sometime make,