My friends—companions in a common grief: My heart is yet too
full of sorrow’s bitterness to frame in fitting terms the
tribute I would wish to pay the gracious memory of our beloved
dead. Save she who bears my name, he whom we buried yesterday
was my dearest friend on earth. Our friendship, born of close
companionship amid academic groves where we together caught the
inspirations that come to wakening intellects, and nursed the
high resolves that budding youth projects as guides along the
future pathway of the man, was nourished as we grew to man’s
estate, and in these latter years so closely knit by constant
intercourse, reciprocal respect each for the other’s judgment,
wishes and desires, and mutual confidences of hopes and fears,
of sacred interests and fond ambitions, that when he died a
great and fervent glow seemed gone from out of my life, and
desolation laid its icy touch upon my heart.
In recognition of these sacred ties that closely bound our
lives, I am bidden here to-day to join my grief to yours and say
a word of him who was as dear to me as man may be to man.
How can I speak at Henry Grady’s funeral! What may I say that
others have not said; that will not, in our history, be written;
for a Nation mourns him and a continent deplores his untimely
taking off, as the passing of the brightest hope that cheered
the future of our common country’s rehabilitated life.
That he was worthy all the homage cultured men may pay to
genius, talent, intellect, and wit, his works and reputation
that survive beyond the grave will abundantly attest. That he
was worthy all the plaudits honest men accord to truth and
justness, integrity and honor, none dare stand here and
interpose the faintest shadow of a doubt. That he was worthy all
the sacred tears that gentle women and blessed little children
may not refrain from showering on his grave as tribute to his
tenderness, his gentleness, his abounding love for all things
human, we, who knew him best, who shared the golden flood of
sunshine his personality evoked and the sweetest, softest
harmonies of the music of his life, we come, a cloud of
witnesses, to testify.
He was truly great if earthly greatness may be measured by the
lofty aspirations men conceive for bettering their fellow men’s
estate, or by the success with which they realize ideals. His
ambition was of the sort that makes men kings—not petty
officers—and led him to aim to teach a mighty Nation how best
its glorious destiny might be achieved. His ample view looked
far beyond the narrow policies of strife and selfishness and
partisan contentions that mark the statesmanship of lesser men,
and counseled the broader, more effective lines of peace and
love, of patience and forbearance. Had he but lived who may
doubt but that his counsels would have prevailed? This city,
which he loved so well and which he builded, stands, in its fair
proportions, the peer of any on the earth in good and equitable
government, the prosperous home of happy, cultured freemen, as a
type of what he wished his neighbors and his fellow-countrymen
might strive to make themselves in contrast with their fellow
men; worthy to stand among the bravest and the best. Its massive
walls stand witness to his energy, his skill and his success.
He was wise, and thousands came to him for counsel. The
University—his loved and loving Alma Mater—whose smiles had
brightened the endeavors of his youth, called him to her
councils in his maturer years, and to-day she sits upon her
classic hills, a Niobe, in tears and clad in mourning for
him—chiefest among her brilliant sons; foremost among her
guardians and advisers.
He was good; and for all the thousand chords of human emotions
he played upon with facile pen and tongue of matchless
eloquence, he ever held a heart in tender sympathy with
childhood’s innocence, the mother’s love, the lover’s passion,
the maiden’s modesty, the sinner’s penitence and the Christian’s
faith.
One consolation comes to us, his sorrowing friends to-day.
Around his bier no fierce contentions wage unseemly strife for
offices left vacant by his death. He held no place that may be
filled by gift of man. He filled no office within the power of
governments or peoples to bestow. He served the public but was
no public servant. He was a private citizen and occupied a
unique position in the commonwealth, exalted beyond the meed of
patronage, won by virtue of his individual qualities and held at
pleasure of his genius and by the grace of God.
Full well I know that, in God’s providence, no one man’s death
may halt the march of time to ultimate events or change the
increasing purpose that through the ages runs, but this I do
believe, that this man’s death has slowed the dial of our
country’s progress to full fruition of its happiness,
prosperity, and peace. To those of us who stand in history
midway between a national life our fathers founded and wrecked
in throes of revolution and of war, and another in the future,
bright with fair promises but ill-defined as yet in form, with
darkling clouds casting grim shadows across the lines along
which it must be achieved, he was our chosen leader and our
trusted champion. No one of us will be tardy in acknowledgment
that he stood head and shoulders above us all and towered at the
very front. That time will bring a successor in the leadership
we reverently pray and confidently hope, but meanwhile our
generation is camped in bivouac by the path of history awaiting
the birth and training of another chief.
Of all his usefulness to nation, state and town; of all that he
contributed to the glory of our country’s history—the brave
defense of its unsullied past; the wise direction of its present
purposes; the high ideals of its future progress—of these,
others with equal knowledge, may speak with greater eloquence
than I. I come especially to pay a simple tribute (time and
occasion serve for nothing more) to the man himself—my
boyhood’s, manhood’s companion, friend and lover. When on the
day he died I nursed my selfish grief within the sacred
precincts of a home which he had often beautified and rendered
joyous by his presence; in the city of his birth, among the
lanes his boyish feet had trod; amid scenes where his genius had
first been plumed to flight; where he had felt the first touch
of manhood’s aspirations and ambitions; where he had pressed his
maiden suit of sacred love; where his dead hero-father lay at
rest, and where the monumental shaft is reared to the base of
which it was his ardent hope that he might bring his son to
anoint him with the glories and the graces of a hero race—I
thought no other’s sorrow could be as keen as mine. But lo! my
neighbors shared an universal grief and draped their homes with
sable tokens of their mourning hearts; the very children in the
streets stopped in their Christmas play and spoke in whispers as
in the presence of a dread calamity; and here, I find myself but
one among a multitude to whom that great and noble heart had
given of its gracious bounty and drawn them to himself by bonds
of everlasting love that caused their tears to flow as freely as
my own, in tribute to the sweetness, gentleness, magnetic
joyousness of him that we have lost.
He was the very embodiment of love. A loving man; a man most
lovable. Affection for his fellows welled from out his heart and
overwhelmed in copious flood all brought within its touch. His
love inspired counter-love in men of all degree. The aged marked
his coming with a brightening smile; the young fell down and
worshiped him. Unselfishness, the chiefest virtue men may
claim—it carries all the others in its train—was possessed by
him in unsurpassed degree. His generosity passed quick and far
beyond the lines marked out by charity and overflowed the limits
fixed by prudence. In fine, the gentler graces all were his:
His gentleness, his tenderness, his fair courtesy,
Were like a ring of virtues ’bout him set,
And God-like charity the center where all met.
Science and religion alike declare that force is indestructible.
Some catch from one and some the other the inspiration that
gives them faith and blessed hope that that great thing we call
the Soul may live and work beyond that accident which we call
Death, which comes with all the terrors of unfathomable mystery
to free the fretting spirit from its carnal chains.
He had no special knowledge—nor cared for none—of scientific
theory or philosophic speculation, but he had gained from deep
religious thought—not technical theology perhaps, but true
religion, the same that taught him to “visit the widows and
fatherless in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted
from the world”—he had gained from this a deep, abiding
conviction in a life beyond the grave. That this was true I
know; for often we have talked of these great mysteries and,
closeted together, have weighed the doubts the increasing
knowledge of the centuries has brought, and I have never known a
man whose convictions were as firm, and who, frankly and
squarely meeting every doubt, retained unshaken faith with all
his heart, soul and mind.
He held it truth with him who sings,
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men _must_ rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.
How far this faith held him in loyalty to churchly creed—the
necessary corollary of such faith as his—others are more
competent than I to tell.
Great Spirit—that which was loose but yesterday from mortal
tenement we sadly laid to rest—thy sorrowing friends send after
thee, along the shimmering lines that guide thy flight from
earth to glory, this fervent prayer—tempering our agony and
comforting our desolation—that God, in His infinite wisdom, may
count thy faith deserving such reward in Heaven as we would
measure to thy works on earth.
God rest thee, princely gentlemen! God keep thee, peerless
friend!
When Mr. Graves was introduced, the audience broke into applause. His
fame as an orator, and his intimate friendship with Mr. Grady were
known, and his eloquent tribute to his dead friend moved the hearts of
his hearers as they had seldom by words been moved before. Upon being
introduced by Mayor Glenn, Mr. Graves said: