Above that of all other men the fame of the orator is transient.
Eloquence may be "logic on fire" as Dr. Lyman Beecher defined it.
Oratory may be, as Emerson said, "the noblest expression of purely
personal energy." But it is so far personal, so allied to grace of
gesture, to charm of manner, to melody of voice, to perfection of
speech, to a commanding presence, that it carries to the future but a
fraction of its power. The cold type and the insentiate page constitute
at best only the record of nature's rarest gift.
Moreover oratory today is at its ebb, as it has been a hundred times
before, and with us the man of eloquence passes to quick oblivion. It
would be futile to deny that the common fate of orators has overtaken
Starr King. Even in California the present generation knows painfully
little of his great services to the State. This is the first serious
attempt, let us hope it will not be the last, accurately to measure the
extent and value of that service so nobly rendered. It is gratifying,
however, to recall that Californians of his own time, and the years
immediately following, paid ample tribute to his work and his memory.
Extraordinary honors, such as never have been given to any private
citizen, were freely and lovingly accorded the patriot-preacher.
On the evening of March 4, 1864, the day of King's death, the San
Francisco Bulletin, then, as now, one of the leading papers of the city,
contained the following tribute:
"The announcement of the death of Rev. Thomas Starr King startles the
community, and shocks it like the loss of a great battle or tidings of
a sudden and undreamed of public calamity. Certainly no other man on the
Pacific Coast would be missed so much. San Francisco has lost one of her
chief attractions; the State, its noblest orator; the country one of her
ablest defenders."
Scarcely forty years of age, a Californian only from 1860 to 1864, he
had in this brief period so won the hearts of men that in honor of
his funeral the legislature and all the courts adjourned, the national
authorities fired minute guns in the bay, while all the flags in the
city and on the ships hung at half-mast, including those of the foreign
consuls and those on the vessels of England, Russia, Hamburg, Columbia
and France. It is believed that in American history no private
individual has been so honored by the federal army and by foreign
nations.
That Starr King's tomb might serve as a daily reminder to the people of
his unique devotion to Union and Liberty, a city ordinance forbidding
burials within certain districts of the city was set aside, and to
this day his grave can be seen close to one of San Francisco's busy
thoroughfares. Nor is this all. One of the giant trees of the Mariposa
bears his name and a proud dome of the Yosemite is called Starr King.
On the 27th of October, 1892, a beautiful and impressive monument
was dedicated in Golden Gate Park to his memory. Its base bears the
inscription:
"In him eloquence, strength and virtue were devoted with fearless
courage to truth, country and his fellow-men."
The dedication address was given by the Hon. Irving M. Scott, a leading
business man of San Francisco. Speaking with the care and sobriety the
occasion demanded, Mr. Scott made the following statement, which the
writer believes will also be the sober verdict of history:
"We do not say that Starr King determined for California the course
which she pursued; but we do say that he was the most potent factor in
effecting that determination."
"The most potent factor in effecting that determination," to establish
this beyond the possibility of cavil or denial, we have told here
once again his inspiring story. The fact that as late as 1913, the
Legislature of California appropriated $10,000 to place a bust of Starr
King in our National Capitol at Washington would seem to indicate
that the people have resolved that this man shall go down to latest
generations as par excellence,--"our hero."
It would be natural, and entirely proper, to close by recounting the
numerous tributes that in the years since King's death have been paid to
his memory, in magazines, memoirs, speeches and poems, but it would seem
like sweetness too long drawn out. And, perhaps, few could resist the
feeling that no human being ever really deserved such "largeness of
love." But they seem so real, they ring so true, that the conviction
grows almost to a certainty that here was one who drew men to him by the
incarnate sweetness and nobility of his nature. "Doubtless," writes his
friend, and co-worker in the Sanitary Commission, Dr. Henry W. Bellows,
"he had his own consciousness of imperfection and sin--for he was human,
but I have yet to know and yet to hear the first suggestion of what his
faults and errors were."
In no spirit of fulsome adulation did a prominent San Franciscan write,
on the Sunday following King's departure to "what lies beyond," these
tender words, "Bells sadly ringing this Sabbath morning remind me that
one pulpit stands empty; and that it must stand empty, to all intents
and purposes, until the church walls crumble, and pulpit, pillars, and
all are resolved into dust."
Another prominent resident of the State, writing a half century
later,--seeing all after the sobering lapse of years, writing as though
the cloud of sorrow for his friend had never been lifted, thus pays his
sincere tribute of respect:
"And so, in the prime of life, at the zenith of his achievement, before
its noon, this sweet, great soul passed away, leaving to those who loved
him, dust and anguish. Well do we remember that almost at his death a
minor earthquake shook the city, and men said, 'Even the earth shudders
at the thought that Starr King is dead.'"
Of the many poetical tributes, two at least, are of permanent
significance. One by his friend Bret Harte, dear companion of those
great years in San Francisco, on "A Pen of Thomas Starr King," is at
once so penetrating and so just that it well deserves here a place:
"This is the reed the dead musician dropped,
With tuneful magic in its sheath still hidden;
The prompt allegro of its music stopped,
Its melodies unbidden.
But who shall finish the unfinished strain,
Or wake the instrument to awe and wonder,
And bid the slender barrel breathe again,
An organ-pipe of thunder!
His pen! what humbler memories cling about
Its golden curves! what shapes and laughing graces
Slipped from its point, when his full heart went out
In smiles and courtly phrases.
The truth, half jesting, half in earnest flung;
The word of cheer, with recognition in it;
The note of alms, whose golden speech outrung
The golden gift within it.
But all in vain the enchanter's wand we wave:
No stroke of ours recalls his magic vision:
The incantation that its power gave
Sleeps with the dead magician."
Could Starr King have been given the privilege of selecting his
poet-laureate we may be sure he would have named Whittier. For they were
both lovers of nature and of man. Both earnest abolitionists, intensely
patriotic, loving liberty and the rights of the humblest of God's
creatures, they were kindred spirits. So Whittier wrote not alone for
New England, not alone for East and West, but from the deeps of his own
loyal and gentle soul, as he penned, these beautiful lines:
"The great work laid upon his two-score years
It's done, and well done. If we drop our tears,
Who loved him as few men were ever loved,
We mourn no blighted hope nor broken plan
With him whose life stands rounded and approved
In the full growth and stature of a man.
Mingle, O bells, along the Western slope,
With your deep toll a sound of faith and hope!
Wave cheerily still, O banner, halfway down,
From thousand-masted bay and steepled town!
Let the strong organ with its loftiest swell
Lift the proud sorrow of the land, and tell
That the brave sower saw his ripened grain.
O East and West! O morn and sunset twain
No more forever!--has he lived in vain
Who, priest of Freedom, made ye one and told
Your bridal service from his lips of gold."
Whittier refuses to believe that King's life, though he lived but "two
score years" was a "broken plan." All who believe that life is of divine
ordering, our days, our duty, our destiny to the last hour will, with
resignation, accept this teaching of faith. To others it will seem
in the nature of an irreparable loss that one so good, and so greatly
useful, should have died so young.
And though he met death with a smile, and said, "Tell my friends that I
went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully," yet it is true that he was
cut off in the midst of noble dreams of service he would still render
humanity. Some one has said that "aspiration, not achievement, is the
measure of human worth." If this be true, or partly true, we may not
pass in silence the unfulfilled ambitions of Starr King.
His first great dream looked toward a career in Boston. He would found a
lectureship, somewhat like, yet most unlike, that afterward conducted by
Joseph Cook. How grandly he would have interpreted from such a platform
the spiritual significance of modern science is made evident in those
great lectures, "Substance and Show," "Laws of Disorder," and in those
memorable sermons dealing with natural phenomena. All the progress of
more than half a century has not rendered them obsolete. They can still
be read with pleasure and profit.
King also planned, when leisure should be afforded him, a work in
philosophy. Something of permanent value to all thinkers and students.
One needs but to read King's lecture on "Socrates" to understand
how rich and valuable such a work would have been. Indeed, here are
paragraphs that could have been written only by one of philosophic
mood and habit of mind. How much of modern "New Thought Philosophy" is
expressed in the following:
"Few acknowledge that thoughts are as substantial as things, that a
feeling is as real as a paving stone, that the soul is a congeries of
actual forces as truly as the body is, that a moral principle is as
persistent and fatal a thing as a chemical agent, and that, in the deeps
of the mind and of society, laws are at work as constant and stern
as those which spin the planets and heave the sea and poise the
firmaments."
Accepting as the ground work of his philosophy such principles as these
King tells us that "Socrates came to the conclusion that the stone which
his chisel chipped was less substantial than the soul in every human
form: and that the beauty which his cunning carved into the block was
less charming and permanent than the beauty of truth, temperance, and
holiness, which faith and culture could leave upon the invisible essence
of man. He therefore resolved to abandon the lower for the higher art of
Sculpture, and instead of being an artist in marble to be a fashioner of
men."
King's aptness for historical and philosophical generalization is quite
evident as we read:
"Socrates was the father of a new method of study. His thoughts were the
seed corn of systems. His pupils were the teachers of centuries. Each
bump of his brain was the nucleus of a philosophical school. Hardly
had he left the world, than the strong and simple light he shed was
scattered in various hues by the prismatic minds that had surrounded him
or that succeeded him; and in almost every case,--as so often happens
when the strands of the solar beam are brilliantly dishevelled,--the
actinic ray was lost."
In all our reading we have never met a description of the Grecian
philosopher so complete and accurate as one brief phrase in the lecture
from which these excerpts are taken, "Socrates, the slouchy ambassador
of reason." Or what could be truer of Socrates and Plato than to say
that "Arm in arm, the stately duke and the democrat of philosophy walk
down the lists of fame?"
Read and re-read the closing paragraph of King's "Socrates" impresses
the thoughtful mind more and more by its depth and beauty, and we
ask,--what might not this man in his full maturity and in scholarly
leisure have contributed to enrich the philosophy of our time?
"Down the River of Life, by its Athenian banks, he had floated upon
his raft of reason serene, in cloudy as in smiling weather, for seventy
years. And now the night is rushing down, and he has reached the mouth
of the stream, and the great ocean is before him, dim heaving in the
dusk. But he betrays no fear. There is land ahead, he thought; eternal
continents there are, that rise in constant light beyond the gloom. He
trusted still in the raft his soul had built, and with a brave farewell
to the few true friends who stood by him on the shore he put out into
the darkness, a moral Columbus, trusting in his haven on the faith of an
idea."
It was an open secret among King's friends in California that he
meditated writing of the Yosemite as he had written of the White Hills
of New Hampshire. Had he done so that region of incomparable beauty
would have been known to the people of our country at least twenty years
earlier. What a volume it would have been, "The Beauty and Glory of the
Yosemite" by Starr King! What a vision he would have given us of that
mighty gorge; of the crystal clearness of Mirror Lake; of the majesty
of Cathedral Rock, of Sentinel Dome, or El Capitan; of the bright
waterfalls, Vernal and the Bridal Veil; or in exquisite artistry of word
painting how he would have pictured for us the wonderful coloring of the
Yosemite, the morning tints of gray, the perfect white of noon shading
into blue, the afternoon tinge of silver and gold, the sunset's gauze
of crimson, and then the varying shades of approaching night. But our
artist never lived to paint the picture for us, and are we not the
poorer? Is there any such thing in this sad world as superfluous genius?
Let our philosophers answer. At all events these were the noble and the
unfulfilled ambitions of Starr King.
It would seem that of American statesmen Mr. King most admired Daniel
Webster. He never shared the feeling of his fellow abolitionists that
Webster's well-known longing to be President had caused him to be false
to liberty, but rather that the great "Defender of the Constitution"
endeavored to preserve the Union for the sake of liberty. As we have
already noted, when the Civil War broke out King found in the service
Webster had rendered the Nation some of his strongest arguments for the
Northern Cause. He was quite ready to accept the judgment of the English
publicist that "Webster was not only the greatest man of his age,--he
was the greatest man of any age." No doubt he had followed every stage
of that momentous career to the very end. All thoughtful Americans went
into retirement with Daniel Webster, and in his last sickness watched
in a kind of reverent awe as his life ebbed away. From the solemn death
chamber in Marshfield, his home by the stormy Atlantic, came tidings
of the great statesman's last moments, in which he repeated, again and
again, the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm. Loving friends bore
tearful witness to the pathos and heavenly beauty of the old words as
they fell from the trembling lips of the dying man, "Yea, though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for Thou
art with me; Thy rod and Thy staff they comfort me."
If it be a coincidence, it is one of striking appropriateness that when
the last hour came to our foremost "Defender of the Constitution and
the Union," that with unclouded mind, here by the Pacific Sea, he, too,
should have passed to his rest, even as the older patriot, whispering
with untroubled faith, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. Yea,
though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no
evil." "I will fear no evil," these were his last words, and it is good
to read that having so spoken, without a struggle or a pang, he entered
upon his exceeding great reward. His work on earth was done, and well
done.
Here ends Starr King in California, as written by Reverend William Day
Simonds, Published in book form by Paul Elder and Company, and seen
through their Tomoye Press by Ricardo J. Orozco in the city of San
Francisco, during the month of April, Nineteen Hundred and Seventeen.
End of Project Gutenberg's Starr King in California, by William Day Simonds