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_From the “Dalton Citizen.”_
ONLY a few short weeks ago Hon. Henry W. Grady left his Atlanta home to
electrify a critical audience in Boston, Mass., with one of his
inimitable speeches. Through all the papers of the country the fame of
this magnificent address went ringing, and ere the speech itself was
printed, in full, the orator from whose lips it fell was stricken with a
fatal disease on his return homeward. In little more than a week his
life’s sands had run their course, and in the flush of a glorious and
useful manhood Henry Grady lay dead, while his eulogies were on the lips
of the whole nation. There has been much written by friends (he had no
foes) in the newspaper world concerning this great loss; but it is all
summed up in the words, “Henry Grady is dead!”
Somewhere, in an English poet’s writings, we find a pregnant little
sentence: “I stood beside the grave of one who blazed the comet of a
season.” The career of Henry Grady has been likened by several speakers
and writers to a star burning brightly in the national and journalistic
sky, but its light quenched in the darkness of death ere it reached its
zenith. Fittest, it seems to us, is the simile quoted previously. A
comet trailing its brilliant light across the darkening heavens, a
spectacle focussing the gaze of millions of eyes, causing other stars to
sink into insignificance by reason of its greater glow and
grandeur.—Then, while the interest concerning its movements has reached
its intensity, its gleaming light fades, and presently the sky is merely
glittering again with the myriad stars, for the flash and the blaze of
the comet have disappeared forever and it is invisible to mortal eyes.
The question is, will another take its place, and when?—We think not
soon. Even should an orator, whose eloquence might sway multitudes, rise
to reign in the dead hero’s stead, it is more than probable that he
would not combine with his oratory the wonderful statistical knowledge
possessed by Mr. Grady, whose solid reasoning was only exceeded by the
winsome touch, creeping in here and there, of the true artistic nature.
He spoke in his last address of the South’s vast resources—of its
“cotton whitening by night beneath the stars, and by day the wheat
locking the sunshine in its bearded sheaf.” A practical argument at one
turn and a beautifully rounded sentence at another.
These things made up the speeches that held so many in breathless
attention, augmented by his magnetic personality. It would be well for
our Southland could another as gifted shine forth in like splendor.
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