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_From the “Marietta Journal.”_
NO sadder news ever fell upon the ears of this people than the
announcement that “Henry Grady is dead!” It staggered our people like a
bolt of lightning from a clear sky.
His death took place at the family residence in Atlanta at 3:40 o’clock
Monday morning, December 22. While on a visit to Boston, where he
delivered the grandest speech of his life, he took cold, and being ill
before he left home, he was prostrated on his return home, his sickness
culminating in pneumonia and death. He was thirty-eight years old at the
time of his death, and no private citizen at that age ever attained the
renown that Grady had. As an orator and journalist he was without a
peer; gifted above his fellows to sway men by his pen or his voice, he
won the applause and admiration and love of his countrymen wherever he
came in contact with them. His young life and genius had been devoted to
deeds of kindness, peace, unity and charity. Selfishness did not enter
his heart, that always beat in response to the woes and sufferings of
his fellow men.
There was a charm and sparkle about his writings that never failed to
captivate the senses, please and entertain. The South lost one of her
brightest minds and stanchest champions in the death of Henry Grady.
There is no man that can take his place in the rare gifts that so
befittingly endowed him in the grand work in which he was engaged. His
loss is an irreparable one. Sorrow and gloom pervade the hearts of our
people over this sad event. We may not understand how one so superbly
gifted, with capacities for the accomplishment of so much good in the
world, is taken, and many who cumber the earth and are stumbling blocks,
are left, but we know the hand of Providence is behind it all, and He is
too wise to err, too good to be unkind.
Grand and noble Grady, we mourn your death; but we know a soul so
radiant with love for humanity, is now at rest with the redeemed.
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