But all that Gibson had done in his artistic career was to him only an apprenticeship. He meant more than he achieved. He was on the way to better things, when death stayed his feet. With all his tremendous intensity, his restless industry, his fulness of conception and scheme, he was yet a man of undreamed-of patience. He saw far ahead of what he had reached, and planned for it, and meant to attain it. He himself regarded all that he had done in black and white, in water-color, even his beginnings in oil, as only the preparation for a larger, stronger art, in which he should interpret the spiritual side of Nature. There was always before his mind a dream of the subtler phases of natural beauty, the deeper meaning she conveys to the listening soul. He was feeling, with more and more force every day that he lived, the spell of “The light that never was on sea or land, The consecration and the poet’s dream,” and the passion grew within him to paint, in the most permanent and adequate medium, the things he was coming to feel and to see. Art was really his goal. Painting was his crowning ambition. His own view of his life was that he had but just fitted himself for a worthier task, that he was just ready to begin the work to which he was called. CHAPTER V THE OPEN EYE We have seen how the passion for the study of nature was born with Gibson, and grew with his growth. He was a naturalist by nature; and all his training strengthened in him the passion which made the young boy, with a “Cecropia” in sight, “feel like an eagle darting at her prey.” The natural world was to him a perpetual attraction, a land to be explored, a mystery to be searched, a delight to be enjoyed. The frontispiece to his chapter “Across Lots” in “Highways and Byways” represents an upland shrubby pasture, beyond whose limits gleam the waters of a pond, backed by a round-topped hill. In the foreground stretches a rail fence, with a gateway whose bars are dropped; and this open pathway to the wild fields and waters he has suggestively entitled “An Invitation.” That invitation was continually pressing upon him. He always felt it, outweighing all other calls, summoning him from every other career, bidding him take to the fields and the woods and the hills, to listen, to see, to learn, and to impart. In 1867, when he was a boy of seventeen, convalescing from a severe illness, he wrote to a dear friend: [Illustration: “_Cypripedium Acaule_” (“_My Studio Neighbors_”) _Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers_]