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_From the “Griffin News.”_
HENRY W. GRADY died at his home in Atlanta late Sunday night of
pneumonia, contracted during his recent trip North. His illness was very
short and his untimely death is a shock not only to his many friends and
admirers, but to the whole State in which he was so well known, and will
be received with regret outside its borders. He was a beautiful writer
and a brilliant orator, as well as a prominent factor in the development
of Atlanta. He will be greatly missed in that city, and his place in the
_Constitution_, of which he was easily the head, will be hard to fill.
Peace to his ashes.
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“JUST HUMAN.”
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_From the “Thomasville Enterprise.”_
THACKERAY, the greatest of English novelists, in the concluding words of
Pendennis, says: “I have not painted a hero, only a man and a brother.”
When Henry W. Grady made his first appearance before the public as a
lecturer, his subject was the words that begin this article—“Just
Human.” This was years ago, when he was only known to the world as a
brilliant young journalist, and even then his fame for quick perception,
incisive utterance and felicitous manner, was only begun. Later years
added to that fame, and with each year, there seemed to come to him a
wider range of ideas, and a bolder conception of the most effectual way
to put those ideas into burning, glowing language.
After he had made his memorable speech before the New England Society in
New York, each succeeding one only raised him higher in public esteem as
a matchless, a magnetic orator, who could wield human hearts as he
would. Through all these speeches, and in all that he ever wrote, there
lingers, like a sweet incense, this thought, that he recognized that men
were “Just Human,” and entitled to all that charity could offer in
extenuation of their faults.
There is not a heart in all the world that has received one pang from
aught that Henry Grady ever wrote or said; his utterances, whether from
the rostrum or through the columns of his paper, always tended to make
the world better, and his ambition seemed to be to smooth away the
differences that annoy, and the bitternesses that gall. There is no man
in all the country that can take up his work where he left it.
Where can we find the same impassioned eloquence that swayed, despite
its force, as gently as the summer breezes that come across fields of
ripe grain?
Where can we find the same acute feeling for the sorrows and sufferings
of men and women, “Just Human,” the same sweet pleading for their
extenuation or their amelioration?
When the epitaph over his grave comes to be written, no better rendering
of the true greatness of the departed could be made than is contained in
the suggestive name of his first lecture, “Just Human,” for the noble
instinct that taught him to plead so eloquently for the failings of his
fellow men, taught him to enter the Divine presence, asking for himself
that mercy he had asked for others.
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