King, "His was one of the noblest and sweetest voices I ever heard."
Edward Everett Hale once wrote, "Starr King was an orator, whom no one
could silence and no one could answer." Says another, "There was
argument in his very voice. It thrilled and throbbed through an audience
like an organ carrying conviction captive before its wonderful melody."
If it is true that William Pitt once ruled the British Nation by his
voice, as good authority affirms, if it is true, that Daniel O'Connell's
voice

Glided easy as a bird may glide,
And played with each wild passion as it went,

may it not also be true that Starr King's clear, penetrating, musical
voice, answering to the moods of the soul as a loved instrument to the
hand of the player, was in itself a kind of gospel of good will to men?

Horace Davis, Starr King's son-in-law, was accustomed to insist that
writers had wholly failed to note one element of the great orator's
power, namely, his humor. Not wit, Mr. Davis would remark, but a most
genial and kindly, and at the same time illuminating humor. A careful
examination of King's published sermons, speeches and lectures gives but
slight evidence of this gift, owing doubtless to false ideas of what
constitutes decorum in the work of a preacher. Occasionally satisfying
evidence is found of the truth of Mr. Davis' judgment, as in the
following:

"On many a tombstone where it is written, 'Here lies so and so, aged
seventy years', the true inscription would read 'In memory of one who in
seventy years lived about five minutes and that was when he first fell
in love.'"