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_From the “Elberton Star.”_
HENRY W. GRADY, the peerless orator and true patriot, has been called to
join the silent majority. This sad intelligence reached Elberton last
Monday morning, by private telegram, and there was a gloom cast over the
community unequaled in the history of the town. Henry Grady was loved
and admired all over the South, but nowhere more dearly than in this
section.
It seems hard that this brilliant young statesman should have been cut
off just before he had gained the goal, just prior to when he would have
written his name among that galaxy of eminent men who have gone before
and made the world better for having lived in it. If Grady had lived he
would have carried to a happy ultimatum the purpose he had just
commenced in solving the vexatious race problem, and in doing this he
would have had a place with the names of Jefferson, Washington, Clay,
Calhoun, and Webster.
Grady was a great man. He was not only an orator of Hill-like ability,
but he was a statesman. His writings and speeches for years were well
able and well panoplied to grapple with and treat the most intricate and
complicated questions in a masterly manner.
His recent speech in Boston, at which time he contracted the cold that
terminated in his premature death, was particularly and singularly
forcible. The press and people, both North and South, with one accord
pronounced it one of the ablest papers of the nineteenth century, and
with this great work begun, and the great architect thereof dead, it is
difficult to conjecture who will or can come to the front and finish the
grand and noble undertaking.
Grady’s first and greatest love was Atlanta. He was like an
inexhaustible gold mine to that town, and the Gate City has sustained an
irreparable loss. But Atlanta’s confines were too contracted for a heart
and brain like his. He loved Georgia, almost like he loved his mother,
and for Georgia’s weal, he would have sacrificed his all.
Georgia’s loss, the South’s loss, cannot be estimated.
At his bier we bow our heads in profound sorrow, and were it so that we
could, we would cull the whitest flower in the whole world and place it
on the grave of this the truest, noblest Georgian of them all.
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