In the late summer of 1880 he spent six weeks in sketching among the White Mountains, whence he went to Williamstown, Massachusetts, for another six weeks of rest. He came home laden with sketches and with photographs, which were at once utilized in making the illustrations for Drake’s “Heart of the White Mountains.” He worked at these with diligence, as we have seen, never a day, apparently, passing without its picture; but it was far into the following spring before the series was finished. The volume was issued in 1881, but before its appearance he was well along with the text and the illustrations for the new articles in the magazine, in the same vein as “Pastoral Days.” In expanded form they were published in the fall of 1882 under the title “Highways and Byways.” It would have seemed improbable that the reception given to his first volume could be repeated. Novelty does so much with Americans to arouse enthusiasm, and they are so quick to compare the later with the former effort, that it might have been predicted that a second volume striking the same note as Gibson’s first success would not be so warmly praised. But the public liked the note, and it pronounced the new book better than the old. The press notices of ’82 and ’83 are in the same strain of unaffected admiration and delight as those of two years before. Perhaps he had most reason to be proud of the approval the new book won from the staid London “Academy” and from Mr. Philip Gilbert Hamerton’s “Portfolio.” The former, though a little late in discovering him was ingenious in its sweeping approval. “Fancy to yourself” said the “Academy,” “a Thoreau who has read both Darwin and Ruskin, and who has learned to use the pencil of Birket Foster. To this add the finest workmanship of the American school of wood-engraving, and all the luxury of the richest paper and the clearest type, and you may form some idea of the handsome book now before us. At first it attracted only by the rare delicacy of its drawings, which reproduce with unrivaled truth the exquisite tracery of vegetation, and the ‘ebon and ivory’ of Nature’s shadows. But when we discovered that the artist is also the author, we began to read; and we found ourselves unable to stop till we got to the end.” “We feel that we have here far more than in most American books, a genuine product of the soil.” Mr. Hamerton credits the new book with “a love of nature that is Wordsworthian in its reverence, the close and patient observation of an artist, the peculiar humor of a genial American in the study of men and things.” To such expressions as these, Mr. George William Curtis, voicing the sentiment of his own countrymen, said of him: “Mr. William Hamilton Gibson’s reputation as one of the first of modern artists for wood-engraving, is established and secure.” “It is hard to believe that the blended softness, vigor, and individuality of the art could go further than in the illustrations of this choice volume.”