*

Starr King was that kind of plant which needs to be repotted in order to
make it flower at its very best. Events kept tugging to loosen his
tendrils from his early environments. People who live on Boston Bay like
to remain there. We have all heard of the good woman who died and went
to Heaven, and after a short sojourn there was asked how she liked it,
and she sighed and said, "Ah, yes, it is very beautiful, but it isn't
East Somerville!"

Had Starr King consented to remain in Boston he might have held his
charge against the ravages of time, secreted a curate, taken on a
becoming buffer of adipose, and glided off by imperceptible degrees on
to the Superannuated List.

But early in that historic month of April, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one,
he set sail for California, having accepted a call from the First
Unitarian Church of San Francisco. This was his first trip to the
Pacific Coast, but New England people had preceded him, and not being
able to return, they wanted Boston to come to them. The journey was made
by the way of Panama, without any special event. The pilot who met the
ship outside of Golden Gate bore them the first news that Sumter had
been fired upon, and the bombardment was at the time when the ship that
bore Starr King was only a few miles from South Carolina's coast.

With prophetic vision Starr King saw the struggle that was to come, and
the words of Webster, uttered many years before, rushed to his lips:

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in
heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments
of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent;
on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal
blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the
gorgeous ensign of the republic now known and honored throughout the
earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in
their original luster, not a stripe erased nor polluted, nor a single
star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as
'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly,
'Liberty first and Union afterwards'; but everywhere, spread over all in
characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they
float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole
heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American
heart--Liberty and Union, now an