Within a few weeks one of the strongest, most vivid and most brilliant
of those pens was laid down on the editorial desk in Atlanta, never
again to be resumed. I was far away at the time. We had been sailing up
from the Mediterranean Sea, through the Dardanelles, which region is
unlike anything I ever saw for beauty. There is not any other water
scenery on earth where God has done so many picturesque things with
islands. They are somewhat like the Thousand Islands of our American St.
Lawrence, but more like heaven. Indeed, we had just passed Patmos, the
place from which John had his apocalyptic vision. Constantinople had
seemed to come out to greet us, for your approach to that city is
different from any other city. Other cities as you approach them seem to
retire, but this city, with its glittering minarets and pinnacles, seems
almost to step into the water to greet you. But my landing there, that
would have been to me an exhilaration, was suddenly stunned with the
tidings of the death of my intimate friend, Henry W. Grady. I could
hardly believe the tidings, for I had left on my study table at home
letters and telegrams from him, those letters and telegrams having a
warmth and geniality, and a wit such as he alone could express. The
departure of no public man for many years has so affected me. For days I
walked about as in a dream, and I resolved that, getting home, I would,
for the sake of his bereaved household, and for the sake of his bereaved
profession, and for the sake of what he had been to me, and shall
continue to be as long as memory lasts, I would speak a word in
appreciation of him, the most promising of Americans, and learn some of
the salient lessons of his departure.
I have no doubt that he had enemies, for no man can live such an active
life as he lived, or be so far in advance of his time without making
enemies, some because he defeated their projects, and some because he
outshone them. Owls and bats never did like the rising sun. But I shall
tell you how he appeared to me, and I am glad that I told him while he
was in full health what I thought of him. Memorial orations and
gravestone epitaphs are often mean enough, for they say of a man after
he is dead that which ought to have been said of him while living. One
garland for a living brow is worth more than a mountain of japonicas and
calla lilies heaped on a funeral casket. By a little black volume of
fifty pages, containing the eulogiums and poems uttered and written at
the demise of Clay and Webster and Calhoun and Lincoln and Sumner, the
world tried to pay for the forty years of obloquy it heaped upon those
living giants. If I say nothing in praise of a man while he lives I will
keep silent when he is dead. Myrtle and weeping willow can never do what
ought to have been done by amaranth and palm branch. No amount of “Dead
March in Saul” rumbling from big organs at the obsequies can atone for
non-appreciation of the man before he fell on sleep. The hearse cannot
do what ought to have been done by chariot. But there are important
things that need to be said about our friend, who was a prophet in
American journalism, and who only a few years ago heard the command of
my text: “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen.”