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." --_Henry Ward Beecher_ [Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER] The influence of Henry Ward Beecher upon his time was marked. And now the stream of his life is lost amid the ocean of our being. As a single drop of aniline in a barrel of water will tint the whole mass, so has the entire American mind been colored through the existence of this one glowing personality. He placed a new interpretation on religion, and we are different people because he lived. He was not constructive, not administrative--he wrote much, but as literature his work has small claim on immortality. He was an orator, and the business of the orator is to inspire other men to think and act for themselves. Orators live but in memory. Their destiny is to be the sweet, elusive fragrance of oblivion--the thyme and mignonette of things that were. The limitations in the all-around man are by-products which are used by destiny in the making of orators. The welling emotions, the vivid imagination, the forgetfulness of self, the abandon to feeling--all these things in Wall Street are spurious coin. No prudent man was ever an orator--no cautious man ever made a multitude change its mind, when it had vowed it would not. Oratory is indiscretion set to music. The great orator is great on account of his weaknesses as well as on account of his strength. So why should we expect the orator to be the impeccable man of perfect parts? These essays attempt to give the man--they are neither a vindication nor an apology. Edmund Gosse has recently said something so wise and to the point on the subject of biography that I can not resist the temptation to quote him: