Twenty-three years ago, poor and painfully uncertain of even a
broken part of education, but shortly from farm and camp and
captivity, broken-hearted and distrusting all things, lonesome
in a strange place, two companions met me at Athens and made me
feel at home. One of them mourns to-day with me the death of the
other.
I look across the many years as across a wide and misty river
made up of many streams, and recall the sunny face, the glowing
eye, the engaging smile, the warm hand formed; it seemed to
assure a friend of love with its very clasp—the happy-hearted,
the happy-making Henry Grady.
Treasured by his companions are traditions that his generous
hands were helpful even then. It is known that his appeal to the
“Great Old Commoner” kept a child of the State to the breast of
its own Alma Mater. It is known that he led the relief corps of
kindness to the aid of maimed veterans shivering in bitter
winter at the old rock college. To suggest such deeds seemed
natural to his heart, and to do them nobly seemed inherent to
his hand.
His was the versatile genius of our class. Never fenced in to
his text-books, apparently careless of mere curriculum, he
roamed the fields of literature more than he tramped the
turnpike of studies. Sparkling and popular, genial and beloved,
his mind moved like a stream of poetry, cascading and flashing,
banked in sweet flowers, and singing to sweet meadows made happy
by its song.
His address as final orator of his society, fairly represents
the mind of the man when launched. It was an exquisite fiction
of ideal life. He painted in words an island of beauty; in the
sweetness of his sentences the fragrance of flowers sweeter than
nature’s own seemed to be wafted to rapt listeners; the
loveliness of his creation stood out so vividly to the eye of
intellect that no one view of any grace in statuary or beauty in
picture of any artist would be remembered better. It was an
island worthy to lay in the same sea with Tennyson’s Island of
Avilion, where Knight and King Arthur was to rest his soul, and
I would wish the soul of my class-mate the sweet and eternal
rest of his own happy island, embowered in the beauties of his
own sweet fancies forever, did I not believe that he has touched
the pearl-strewn shore of a better and lovelier land than even
this, or even that of which he dreamed; that he “rests in the
balm-breathing gardens of God!”
Who would dream that such ideality of mind would be composed
with such powers of business as he had? It is wonderful that the
versatile course of his life, while adding to his breadth, did
not lessen his depth. To but few, indeed, is it endowed to be
both versatile and profound. His varied experience, like
tributes, added to the brightness and to the breadth, and to the
depth of his intellect, until before touching the sea it rolled
in majestic splendor, wide and clear as the Potomac, deep and
burden-bearing as the Ohio. He had great opportunities. He
worked and won them. Starting without them, he created them by
deserving them. That great journal, through whose columns he and
his associates have done so much to rebuild the fortunes and
hopes of our people, did not make Henry Grady. The Lord made
him. But his bereaved associates there did all that men can do
in the moulding of other men. They recognized him for what he
was and for what he could become. They participated in the
glorious work, They surrendered him, and he surrendered himself
to his country. The first duty of the Southern patriot—a
national duty also—was to recuperate this section. In that duty,
no man out of office, perhaps no man at all, has labored with
more credit and with better result than Henry W. Grady. For the
complete reconciliation of the sections of this Union every
patriot ought to strive and every Christian ought to pray.
Sectional jealousies and angers are the only enemies of the
Union, and those who claim to place the preservation of the
Union above all other duties, ought to be the foremost
forwarders of the fraternity of the American people. They who
love the Union should help to heal its wounds.
Strange spectacle! Noble culmination of a noble life! From the
midst of those charged with hate toward the Union, Henry W.
Grady went forth a minister to plead for love to all its parts.
“Blessed is the peacemaker.”
His voice was for that peace in our country made perpetual by
justice to all and respect for the sacred things of earth. His
voice was for building an American temple of peace, not upon the
quicksands of comparative power, subject to the shift from one
section to the other, but upon the everlasting foundations of
right to all, respect to all, liberties and liberality to all!
Oh, what a cause he had! If successful, unfolded glories of the
Union of future times; the sweet and swelling harmonies of the
ever-increasing choir of free and happy States; the grand ideals
of the venerable fathers all realized, and every bloom of
American hope fruited in happiness, in love, in liberty, in
enduring peace!
And if unsuccessful! If he and those to come must plead in vain
for the unity as well as union of the country, then the dread
doubt whether all peace is to be only preparation for deadly
grapplings; the dread doubt whether, as in England and Scotland,
these feuds are to harry our homes and our hearts for hundreds
of years!
What a cause! and, thank God, what an advocate! It would seem
that our own Southern sun had warmed and sweetened him for the
work. He exactly fitted the culmination and mission of his life.
His noble soul propelled his thoughts. His eloquence rushed from
mountain-side fountains, pure and bold and free. His reasoning
was so blended with appeal that the one took the shape of
stating truths in sequence, and his appeal seemed responsive to
the heart-beats of his listeners.
Thus the cause, the advocate and the occasion met, and once more
in New England a Southern man was applauded as an American
patriot. With the triple levers of his great soul and mind and
tongue he moved two mighty sections, with all their weights of
passions of victory and passions of defeat, with all their
weights of misconceptions and misjudgments. With his hands he
moved these mighty bodies nearer each to the heart of the
other—nearer to that true Union for which the real heart of this
country, in every part of it, beats with the pulses of a devoted
love, never entirely to be stilled.
Oh, how nobly he must have been inspired as he felt the
“rock-ribbed and iron-bound” prejudice of New England quiver to
the touch of his magic hand; and as her snow began to melt under
the warmth of his great heart, surely he was the sunshine of
this great land!
But, oh, the grief of it—the bitter, bitter grief of it! Just as
we knew how noble and great he was, he sank below the horizon of
life, never to rise again!
I shall always recall him as dying like that lad from Lombardy,
pictured by Browning. I shall think that the South, decked like
a queen in all her jewels of glory and of love, came to his
dying couch and said:
“Thou art a Lombard, my brother! Happy art thou,” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him. He dreamed in her face and died!