Thomas Starr King

We see, then, in looking at a chain of lofty hills, and in thinking of their perpetual waste in the service of the lowlands, that the moral and physical worlds are built on the same pattern. They represent the heroes and all-beneficent genius. They receive upon their heads and sides the larger baptisms from the heavens, not to be selfish with their riches, but to give,—to give all that is poured upon them,—yes, and something of themselves with every stream and tide.

                                                                             — Thomas Starr King

THE MOUNTAIN  is so many things at once – a geological event, a meteorological force, a region of staggered botanical zones – that it is easy to forget that it is also a metaphysical event, the object of rich and varied contemplation. Mountains are schools and cathedrals, John Ruskin wrote, and all but the most insensible minds are educated and refined by alpine experiences. Mountains are, as Ruskin put it, “full of treasures of illuminated manuscript for the scholar, kindly in simple lessons to the worker, quiet in pale cloisters for the thinker, glorious in holiness for the worshipper.” In rock and ravine, forest and crag, mountains utter spiritual truths, sermons in stone that can never be fully translated into words.

There are mountains of books about mountains. Many of these are guides about natural history, about the dwarf cinquefoil that grows on alpine slopes, the glacial erratics and krummholz, the wind patterns and ice formations that characterize the higher altitudes. Plenty of other books recount mountain adventures and feats, daring expeditions up Everest or Denali. But it is no so easy to find books about what mountains mean, about their influence on the psyche.

In the mid-nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Thomas Starr King took to rambling through the White Mountains of New Hampshire at a time when alpine jaunts were still relatively new to Americans. The book he wrote recording his research and observations, The White Hills: Their Legends, Landscape and Poetry, was a bestseller at the time it was published in 1859 and it remains, despite its occasional lapses into unrestrained rhapsody, one of the most charming meditations on the beauty and symbolism of mountains. Starr King was a famous preacher in New England during his short life and was later influential in California politics during his few years as head of a San Francisco comgregation. But it is his love of mountains, his shining exposition on behalf of the silent summits, that distinguishes him today. Mountains, he insisted, are the “heroes and prophets” of the natural world. From The White Hills:

The mountains are more grand and inspiring when we stand at the proper distance and look at them, than when we look from them. Their highest call is to be resting places of the light, the staffs from which the most gorgeous banners of morning and evening are displayed. And these uses we may observe and enjoy among the moderate mountains of New Hampshire. They are huge lay figures on which Nature shows off the splendors of her aerial wardrobe. She makes them wear mourning veils of shadow, exquisite lace-work of distant rain, hoary wigs of cloud, the blue costume of northwest wind, the sallow dress of southern airs, white wrappers of dog-day fog, purple and scarlet vests of sunset light, gauzy films of moonlight, the gorgeous embroidery of autumn chemistries, the flashing ermine dropped from the winter sky, and the glittering jewelry strewn over their snowy vestments by the cunning fingers of the frost.

The White Mountains cover about one fourth the territory of New Hampshire. They include the Presidential Range, the Franconia Range, the Sandwich Range, and the Kinsman Range. None of the Whites exceed 7,000 feet in height, making them modest in stature relative to the Alps, the Rockies and the Himalayas, but what they lack in dizzying height, they make up for in varied and breathtaking beauty, in soaring ravines, majestic cliffs, carpeted forests, plunging waterfalls and pristine ponds. They do present some challenging climbs, particularly in winter, when the peak of Mount Washington becomes one of the most climatically tempestuous spots on earth. Two weeks ago, a 24-year-old man was killed climbing up Tuckerman Ravine on Washington.

Starr King objected to the abandonment of the original sonorous Indian names of these peaks:

The names which the highest peaks of the great range bear were given to them in 1820, by a party from Lancaster. How absurd the order is! … Webster, Clinton, Pleasant, Franklin, Monroe, Washington, Clay, Jefferson, Adams, Madison. What a wretched jumble! These are what we have taken in exchange for such Indian words as Agiochook, which is the baptismal title of Mount Washington, and for words like Amonoosuc, Moosehillock, Contoocook, Pennacook, Pentucket… How much better to have given the highest peaks of both ranges the names of some great tribes or chiefs…

The White Mountains were known as “Waumbek” in a local Indian dialect, a word which means “mountains with snowy foreheads.” Ironically, a small mountain in Coos County has been named after Starr King, as has a ravine in the Whites and a peak in Yosemite.

Starr King fit admirably into the current of nineteenth century Romanticism and Transcendentalism, thought which inspired the landscapes of the Hudson River school and the nature writings of Emerson and Thoreau. He was pastor of the Hollis Street Church, a prominent Boston congregation, with his own Emersonian mission to awaken the lifeless to nature. “What would a soul be with no pure delight in the beauty of the world?” King asked in a sermon. In The White Hills:

A visit to New Hampshire supplies the most resources to a traveler, and confers the most benefit on the mind and taste, when it lifts him above mere appetite for wildness, ruggedness,and the feeling of mass and precipitous elevation, into a perception and love of the refined grandeur, the chaste sublimity, the airy majesty overlaid with tender and polished bloom,in which the landscape splendor of a noble mountain lies….Every triumph of a human artist is only an illusion, producing a semblance of a real charm of air or foliage,of sunset cloud, or dewy grass, or mountain splendor,which Nature offers.

He complained that tourists of his time “gulped down” the mountain scenery and too many people had an annoying habit of feigning indifference before spectacular sights. His words on this subject are as fresh as they were 150 years ago:

Sometimes, people go into New Hampshire with such apathetic eyes, that they have no relish for richness of landscape, or for mountain grandeur. There is no smack in their seeing. And there are others, who, if they are not disappointed in the outlines, the heights, and the colors that are shown to them, still think it vulgar to show enthusiasm. Any glee, or clapping of the hands, or hot superlative, is almost as heinous to them as a violation of the moral law. Just as some women think health vulgar, and cultivate languor, there are persons who repress real feeling, and assume the blaxi mood as a matter of gentility or manners…

…Let us remember that pure delight in natural scenes themselves, is the crown of all artistic power or appreciation. And when a man loses enthusiasm,—when there is no surprise in the gush of evening pomp out of the west,—when the miracle of beauty has become commonplace,—when the world has become withered and soggy to his eye, so that, instead of finding its countenance ” fresh as on creation’s clay,” he looks at each lovely object and scene, and, like the travelling Englishman, oppressed with ennui, finds ” nothing in it,” —it is about time for him to be transplanted to some other planet. Why not to the moon ? No [Lake] Winnipiseogee is there. There are mountains enough, but they show no azure and no gold. There are pits enough, but there is no water in them ; no clouds hover over them ; no air and moisture diffuses and varies the light. It is a planet of bare facts, without the frescos and garniture of beauty, a mere skeleton globe, and so perhaps is the Botany Bay for spirits that have become torpid and blast.

Starr King’s observations of clouds, weather, the cascading waters, the vegetation and geology, as well as the legends of people such as the Willey family, who perished in a rock slide, are discerning and informative.  It wasn’t until the seventeenth century that any man climbed to the top of Mount Washington. The Indian natives of the area believed it was dangerous to ascend the highest peaks; the gods would seek revenge. And, it wasn’t until the mid-nineteenth century that many paths were cleared and the peaks were opened to large numbers of hikers and nature lovers. Thus his guide came at the right time. Even explaining the more scientific aspects of mountains, their geology and environmental conditions, Starr King speaks with style and vividness:

The uses of mountain ranges, in relation to the supply of water, are so evident that we need not dwell long upon them. It is plain that we could not live upon the globe in any state of civilization, if the surface had been finished as a monotonous prairie. Were it not for the great swells of land, the ridges and crests of rock, the wrinkles, curves, and writhings of the strata, how could springs of water be formed ? what drainage could a country have ? how could the rains be hoarded in fountains and lakes ? where would be the storehouses of the snow and hail ? ” Every fountain and river, from the inch-deep streamlet that crosses the village lane in trembling clearness, to the massy and silent march of the everlasting multitude of waters in Amazon or Ganges, owe their play and purity and power, to the ordained elevations of the earth.” Ah, how does the aqueduct masonry of Rome, or the Croton and Cochituate system of supply for cities, compare with Nature’s chain of reservoirs,—the Rocky Mountains, the Andes, and the Alleghanies, and the service-pipes she gullies in their granite for pastures, towns, cities, and states !

The richest beauty that invests the mountains suggests this branch of their utility. The mists that settle round them, above which their cones sometimes float, aerial islands in a stagnant sea; the veils of rain that trail along them ; the crystal snow that makes the light twinkle and dance ; the sombre thunder-heads that invest them with Sinai-like awe, are all connected with their mission as the hydraulic distributors of the world,—the mighty troughs that apportion to the land the moisture which the noiseless solar suction is ever lifting from the sea. Their peaks are the cradles, their furrows the first playgrounds, of the great rivers of the earth.

But where Starr King is at his best is when probing the nobility of mountains. Their greatness, he says, lies in their intimations of character.

When we look up at old Lafayette, or along the eastern slopes of Mount Washington, we find the the lines of noblest expression are those which the torrents have made, where soil has been torn out, and rocks have been grooved, and ridges have been made more nervous, nd the wqalls of ravines have been channelled for noble pencillings of shadow, by the waste of the mountain in its patient suffering. In its gala days of sunlight, the artist finds that its glory is its character. All its losses then are glorified into expression. The great mountains rise in the landscape as heroes and prophets in history, ennobled by what they have given, sublime in the expressions of struggle and pain, invested witht he richest draperies of light, because their brows have been torn, and their cheeks been furrowed by toils and cares in behalf of districts below. Up0n the mountains is written the law, and in their grandeur is displayed the fulfillment of it, that perfection comes through suffering.

At the same time mountains present vitality:

The highest mountains are inverted shafts,—upspringing wedges of rock, flinging the garment of soil away, tilting and separating the strata through which they break, and standing bare for the scrutiny of science. Thus the highest mountain crests are tide lines of the force that slumbers in the planet’s bosom. The most stiff and resistant features of the world to our senses, they are really the outbursts of the globe’s passion, the witnesses of a pent fury that may yet break forth in violence not yet conceived, before which Ossa indeed is ” but a wart,” and Orizaba a mere toy. . Well has it been said, that ” mountains are to the rest of the body of the earth what violent muscular action is to the body of man. The muscles and tendons of its anatomy are, in the mountain, brought out with fierce and convulsive energy, full of expression, passion, and strength; the plains and the lower hills are the repose and the effortless motion of the frame, when its muscles lie dormant and concealed beneath the lines of its beauty, yet ruling those lines in their every undulation.” This vigor, this fierce vitality, in which they had their origin, is the source of much of the exhilaration which the sight of their wild outlines inspires, even when the beholder is unconscious of it.

Starr King was small and boyish-looking – he weighed only 120 pounds. Nevertheless, he was able to hike the White mountains during his vacation and weekends off with impressive energy. He left New England altogether in his mid-thirties to become pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Francisco in 1860, where he was known for his effort to keep California in the Union during the Civil War. Several schools in the West are named for him. He died of pneumonia and diptheria in California in 1864 at the age of 40. He said to his wife moments before he expired, “Do not weep for me. I know it is all right. I wish I could make you feel so, I wish I could describe my feelings. It is strange. I see all the privileges and greatness of the future. It already looks grand, beautiful. Tell them I went lovingly, trustfully, peacefully.”

A man so alive to the world’s beauty, who took such delight in the aloofness and austerity of nature’s feats of height, may have had remarkable visions at the end. His wonderful book, long out of print, remains a treasure, even for those stuck in the lowlands. I passed through the small town of Starr King last week on a trip to New Hampshire and looked for a sign of some memorial to this preacher of the summits. I saw no obvious homage to him except the everlasting hills in the distance, the misty, hunkered outlines of the glorious Whites.

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