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_Dr. H. M. Field in “New York Evangelist.”_
IT is with a grief that we cannot express, that we write the above name,
and add that he who bore it is no longer among the living. The most
brilliant and gifted man in all the South—the one who, though still
young, had acquired immense popularity and influence, which made him
useful alike to the South and to the whole country—has gone to his
grave. He has died in his prime, at the early age of thirty-eight, in
the maturity of his powers, with the rich promise of life all before
him.
Our acquaintance with Mr. Grady began nine years ago, when we saw him
for the first time in the office of a brother of ours, who was able to
give him the help which he needed to purchase a quarter of the Atlanta
_Constitution_. This at once made his position, as it gave him a point
of vantage from which to exercise his wonderful gifts. From that moment
his career was open before him; his genius would do the rest. This
kindness he never forgot, and it led to his personal relations with us,
which afterwards became those of intimacy and friendship.
When we first saw him, his face was almost boyish, round and ruddy with
health, his eyes sparkling with intelligence, as well as with the wit
and humor which he perhaps inherited from some ancestor of Irish blood.
His face, like his character, matured with years; yet it always had a
youthful appearance, which was the outward token of the immense vitality
within him. We have seldom known a man who was so intensely alive—alive
to the very tips of his fingers. As a writer, he was one of the very
best for the variety of work required in the office of a great journal.
His style was animated and picturesque, and he had an infinite
versatility; turning his pen now to this subject and now to that;
throwing off here a sharp paragraph, and there a vigorous editorial; but
never in either writing a dull line. The same freshness and alertness of
mind he showed in conversation, where he was as brilliant as with his
pen. He would tell a story with all the animation and mimicry of an
actor, alternating with touches of humor and pathos that were quite
inimitable. It was the chief pleasure of our visit to Atlanta to renew
this delightful acquaintance—a pleasure which we had twice last winter
in going to, and returning from, Florida. Never shall we forget the last
time that we sat before his fire, with his charming family and several
clergymen of Atlanta, and listened to the endless variety of his
marvelous talk.
Nor was his power confined to this limited circle. He was not only a
brilliant conversationalist and writer, but a genuine orator. No man
could take an audience from the first sentence, and hold it to the last,
more perfectly than he. His speech before the New England Society in
this city three years ago gave him at once a national reputation. It
came to us when abroad, and even so far away, on the shores of the
Mediterranean, at Palermo, in Sicily, we were thrilled by its fervid
eloquence. A second speech, not less powerful, was delivered but two
weeks since in Boston; and it was in coming on to this, and in a visit
to Plymouth Rock, where he was called upon to make a speech in the open
air, that he took the cold which developed into pneumonia, and caused
his death.
But Mr. Grady’s chief claim to grateful remembrance by the whole country
is that he was a pacificator between the North and the South. Born in
the South, he loved it intensely. His own family had suffered in the war
an irreparable loss. He once said to us as we came from his house, where
we had been to call upon his mother, whose gentle face was saddened by a
great sorrow that had cast a shadow over her life, “You know my father
was killed at Petersburg.” But in spite of these sad memories, he
cherished no hatred, nor bitterness, but felt that the prosperity of
millions depended on a complete reconciliation of the two sections, so
that North and South should once more be one country. This aim he kept
constantly in view, both in his speeches and in his writings, wherein
there were some things in which we did not agree, as our readers may see
in the letter published this very week on our first page. But we always
recognized his sincerity and manliness, and his ardent love for the land
of his birth, for all which we admired him and loved him—and love him
still—and on this Christmas day approach with the great crowd of
mourners, and cast this flower upon his new-made grave.
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