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_From the “Henry County Times.”_
THE public heart, still quivering and aching from the shock occasioned
by the death of its venerated and talented leader, Jefferson Davis, had
its cup of woe and grief filled to overflowing by those words of
doom—“Henry Grady is dead.” In the natural course of events, the first
catastrophe was one that might have happened any time in the past ten
years, as the great Confederate chief had long since passed the limit of
three-score-and-ten, the average limit attached by Biblical authority to
human life. Mr. Davis descended to his grave full of years and honors,
and while he was universally and sincerely mourned in the South, still,
it did not fall upon us with that electric suddenness which so shocked
and agonized the Southern heart as when our young Demosthenes became a
victim to the fell destroyer.
So universal is this sorrow, that a separate and personal bereavement
could not have more completely shrouded in grief the public mind than
did the announcement of his death. The advent of the dark angel into
each and every household could not have more completely paralyzed the
public mind than did the untimely taking off of this superbly gifted son
of Georgia. Never since the angel of the Lord smote the first-born of
Egyptian households for lack of mystic symbols on the door, has a
people’s sorrow been so deep, so universal, and so sincere. Had the end
of such a man come in the proper course of nature, heralded by such
physical changes as indicate the approach of death, it might have been
better borne, but would still have been an event of national misfortune
that would have taxed to the uttermost the endurance of hearts already
lacerated by freshly opened wounds. Had we been in the possession of
such warnings as it was in the power of Omnipotence to have granted us,
still the blow would have been unutterably painful and overpowering. But
that he, who was conceded to be the intellectual peer of any in the
nation; who was without a superior as an orator in the present
generation; that he who was in an especial manner fitted to be the
champion of the South in her appeal for justice at the bar of public
opinion, both in Europe and America; that he, who was so richly endowed
should suddenly and without warning, as it were, become the victim of
death, and have all the bright and brilliant promise of a life whose sun
had risen so gloriously, quenched in death and darkness, might well move
a people to tears, and clothe a nation in sackcloth and ashes.
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