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By Root 1709 0

in colors more vibrant than any he had seen in a New Hampshire autumn, delighted him.68 Even the occasional earthquakes, he said, made him want to stand up and shout “Encore!” King made a midsummer jaunt to the Sierra Nevada—no doubt at the Frémonts’ urging—and sent an ebullient series of articles about it to the Boston Evening Transcript, the paper of record for the Beacon Hill set. One dispatch included, amid the scenic sublimities, an equally extravagant appraisal of the colonel’s real estate holdings, currently on the market for investment: “perhaps the most valuable mining property in the world,” King called it. (Clearly, the author was already getting the hang of California, a place where high art and hucksterism bunked contentedly together.)

But it was the garden at Black Point that truly opened King’s eyes to the wonderful possibilities of the West. Life and landscape were integrated there. Nature was not something you traveled to on the Boston & Maine Railroad. The wild heart of the American continent lay just beyond the edge of the luncheon table. “Yesterday I dined with Mrs. Frémont,” King told an old friend back East, “& walked bareheaded among roses, geraniums, vines & fuchsias in profuse bloom.” Here was a place where even a Boston Unitarian could take his hat off outdoors!69

Another afternoon, King came unannounced, asking simply whether he could sit alone in the garden, on a small rug that he spread beneath a laurel tree: the view of sea and mountains, he told Mrs. Frémont afterward, helped him to “regain” himself. After this she set up a study in a secluded corner of the grounds where he could come each morning to work undisturbed on his articles and sermons. At noon, she would send over a servant with lunch, and at teatime he would emerge to share with her what he had written.70

The West was transforming him. In his Boston sermons, King had trod somewhat cautiously down the pathways of transcendentalism, offering palatable versions of Emersonian abstractions. In his White Mountains book, he had rhapsodized over the scenery but had also taken care to advise readers on local hotels. Here in California, however, he made the very crags and valleys resound with divine reproach, with glory and terror: “So many of us there are who have no majestic landscapes for the heart—no grandeurs of the inner life! We live on the flats. We live in a moral country, which is dry, droughty, barren. We have no great hopes. We have no sense of Infinite guard and care. We have no sacred and cleansing fears. We have no consciousness of Divine, All-enfolding Love. We may make an outward visit to the Sierras, but there are no Yosemites in the soul.”71

He had always hated slavery, of course, but from his pulpit on Hollis Street he had rarely even uttered the offensive word, let alone tried to preach politics. His denunciations were almost always couched in biblical allegories. (The week that Anthony Burns was marched down State Street between ranks of soldiers, King had preached a sermon that he was rather proud of, on the trial of Christ before Pilate.) Indeed, he had made quite clear that he disdained “radical eloquence” and “abstract principles”: Boston already had more than enough Sunday-morning legislators.72

In San Francisco, though, his resolve began to waver. He accompanied Mrs. Frémont and Mr. Harte to the American Theatre on the night of Senator Baker’s great speech and was overwhelmed with several strong emotions, not least of them envy. “That is the true way to reach men!” he said, pacing around the Frémonts’ private box in his excitement. His own preaching was a paltry thing by comparison, he told Jessie: it could never have the seismic effect of Baker’s. Later that night, she set out to convince him otherwise. She told him he was destined for politics; she even claimed, King said in wonder, to be “distressed that I have not lived longer in the state, so that she could have me elected Senator this winter.” In this pasty-skinned clergyman, she saw not only wit and intellect but also something that less perceptive eyes