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_From the “Charleston Evening Sun.”_
HENRY GRADY is dead.
With what an electric shock of pain and grief will this simple
announcement thrill the entire country. His death, following close upon
the death of the chieftain of the Old South—full of age and honors, and
followed to the grave by the reverential and chastened grief of a whole
people—is in striking contrast and more poignant in its nature, since
the young Hercules thus prematurely cut down had just sprung to the
front as leader and chieftain of the New South, and was largely the
embodiment of her renaissance, her rejuvenescent life and hopes and
aspirations, as the other was of her dead and sacred past.
In the prime of life and the flower of robust manhood, having just
signalized himself by a triumph in which all his powers of culture,
talent, and patriotism were taxed to the highest and nobly responded to
the demand made them, and having placed himself in the foremost ranks of
the world’s great men as a splendid type of the South’s peculiar
qualities, as a worthy heir of the virtues of the Old South, and as the
strongest champion of the hopes of the New, his death at this time is to
her a distinct calamity. And yet for his own individual fame’s sake it
is to be doubted whether Mr. Grady, lived he “a thousand years, would
find” himself “so apt to die,” as now in the zenith of his fame, with
his “blushing honors thick upon him.”
With Burke he could say, “I can shut the book. I might wish to read a
page or two more. But this is enough for my measure.”
Mr. Grady had gained the attention of the Northern ear and the
confidence of the Northern people as no other Southerner could boast of
having done. When those “grave and reverend seigniors” of the stern,
inflexible, unemotional Puritan race, who not a fortnight since, in
Boston’s banquet hall, wept manly unused tears at the magic eloquence
and pathos of the young Southerner’s words, and fell to love him for the
uncompromising truth, the manliness, the directness and the candor of
them, and for the personal grace and fascination and humanitarian
kindliness of the speaker—when they learn that this being, so lately
among them, the chief object of their care and attention, and so
sentient-seeming and bounding with life and the God-given inspiration of
more than mortal vigor called genius—that this being, so gifted, so
sanguine, lies cold and breathless in the chill arms of death, shall
they not, and through them the great people of whom they are the
proudest representatives, mingle their tears with ours over the mortal
remains of this new dead son of the South, in whose heart was no
rankling of the old deathly fratricidal bitterness, but whose voice was
ever raised for the re-cementing of the fraternal ties so rudely broken
by the late huge world-shaking internecine strife?
And shall not his great appeal—yet echoing over the country—for justice,
moderation, forbearance, appreciation for the South and the social evil
under which she is providentially unequally laboring to her destiny, be
inerasibly impressed upon the country, coming as it does from the lips
of a dying man?
In the death of Jefferson Davis the last barrier to a complete reunion
of the sections was removed. In the death of Henry Grady the North and
the South will be brought together to mourn a mutual bereavement. If it
shall be the cause of completing the reunion of the sections, his sad
and untimely death will not have been in vain.
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