Starr King gave his life to the Cause. He as much died for the Union as though he had fallen stricken by flying lead upon the field. And he knew what he was doing, but in answer to his warning friends he said, "I have only one life to live and now is my time to spend it."
For three years, lacking two months, he spoke and preached several times every week. All he made and all he was he freely gave.
For that frail frame this life of intensity had but one end.
The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, but Lee's surrender was yet to be.
"May I live to see unity and peace for my country," was the constant prayer of the devoted preacher.
Starr King died March Fourth, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four, aged forty years. The closing words of his lecture on Socrates might well be applied to himself: "Down the river of Life, by its Athenian banks, he had floated upon his raft of reason serene, in cloudy as in smiling weather. 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 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."
HENRY WARD BEECHER
You know how the heart is subject to freshets; you know how the mother, always loving her child, yet seeing in it some new wile of affection, will catch it up and cover it with kisses and break forth in a rapture of loving. Such a kind of heart-glow fell from the Savior upon that young man who said to him, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" It is said, "Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him."