Chapter II (2)

Judge Emory Speer was on the list of speakers to follow Mr.
Brown, but did not reach the city in time to take part in the
exercises.

SPEECH OF HON. ALBERT COX.

Twenty-three years ago, poor and painfully uncertain of even a
broken part of education, but shortly from farm and camp and
captivity, broken-hearted and distrusting all things, lonesome
in a strange place, two companions met me at Athens and made me
feel at home. One of them mourns to-day with me the death of the
other.

I look across the many years as across a wide and misty river
made up of many streams, and recall the sunny face, the glowing
eye, the engaging smile, the warm hand formed; it seemed to
assure a friend of love with its very clasp—the happy-hearted,
the happy-making Henry Grady.

Treasured by his companions are traditions that his generous
hands were helpful even then. It is known that his appeal to the
“Great Old Commoner” kept a child of the State to the breast of
its own Alma Mater. It is known that he led the relief corps of
kindness to the aid of maimed veterans shivering in bitter
winter at the old rock college. To suggest such deeds seemed
natural to his heart, and to do them nobly seemed inherent to
his hand.

His was the versatile genius of our class. Never fenced in to
his text-books, apparently careless of mere curriculum, he
roamed the fields of literature more than he tramped the
turnpike of studies. Sparkling and popular, genial and beloved,
his mind moved like a stream of poetry, cascading and flashing,
banked in sweet flowers, and singing to sweet meadows made happy
by its song.

His address as final orator of his society, fairly represents
the mind of the man when launched. It was an exquisite fiction
of ideal life. He painted in words an island of beauty; in the
sweetness of his sentences the fragrance of flowers sweeter than
nature’s own seemed to be wafted to rapt listeners; the
loveliness of his creation stood out so vividly to the eye of
intellect that no one view of any grace in statuary or beauty in
picture of any artist would be remembered better. It was an
island worthy to lay in the same sea with Tennyson’s Island of
Avilion, where Knight and King Arthur was to rest his soul, and
I would wish the soul of my class-mate the sweet and eternal
rest of his own happy island, embowered in the beauties of his
own sweet fancies forever, did I not believe that he has touched
the pearl-strewn shore of a better and lovelier land than even
this, or even that of which he dreamed; that he “rests in the
balm-breathing gardens of God!”

Who would dream that such ideality of mind would be composed
with such powers of business as he had? It is wonderful that the
versatile course of his life, while adding to his breadth, did
not lessen his depth. To but few, indeed, is it endowed to be
both versatile and profound. His varied experience, like
tributes, added to the brightness and to the breadth, and to the
depth of his intellect, until before touching the sea it rolled
in majestic splendor, wide and clear as the Potomac, deep and
burden-bearing as the Ohio. He had great opportunities. He
worked and won them. Starting without them, he created them by
deserving them. That great journal, through whose columns he and
his associates have done so much to rebuild the fortunes and
hopes of our people, did not make Henry Grady. The Lord made
him. But his bereaved associates there did all that men can do
in the moulding of other men. They recognized him for what he
was and for what he could become. They participated in the
glorious work, They surrendered him, and he surrendered himself
to his country. The first duty of the Southern patriot—a
national duty also—was to recuperate this section. In that duty,
no man out of office, perhaps no man at all, has labored with
more credit and with better result than Henry W. Grady. For the
complete reconciliation of the sections of this Union every
patriot ought to strive and every Christian ought to pray.
Sectional jealousies and angers are the only enemies of the
Union, and those who claim to place the preservation of the
Union above all other duties, ought to be the foremost
forwarders of the fraternity of the American people. They who
love the Union should help to heal its wounds.

Strange spectacle! Noble culmination of a noble life! From the
midst of those charged with hate toward the Union, Henry W.
Grady went forth a minister to plead for love to all its parts.

“Blessed is the peacemaker.”

His voice was for that peace in our country made perpetual by
justice to all and respect for the sacred things of earth. His
voice was for building an American temple of peace, not upon the
quicksands of comparative power, subject to the shift from one
section to the other, but upon the everlasting foundations of
right to all, respect to all, liberties and liberality to all!

Oh, what a cause he had! If successful, unfolded glories of the
Union of future times; the sweet and swelling harmonies of the
ever-increasing choir of free and happy States; the grand ideals
of the venerable fathers all realized, and every bloom of
American hope fruited in happiness, in love, in liberty, in
enduring peace!

And if unsuccessful! If he and those to come must plead in vain
for the unity as well as union of the country, then the dread
doubt whether all peace is to be only preparation for deadly
grapplings; the dread doubt whether, as in England and Scotland,
these feuds are to harry our homes and our hearts for hundreds
of years!

What a cause! and, thank God, what an advocate! It would seem
that our own Southern sun had warmed and sweetened him for the
work. He exactly fitted the culmination and mission of his life.
His noble soul propelled his thoughts. His eloquence rushed from
mountain-side fountains, pure and bold and free. His reasoning
was so blended with appeal that the one took the shape of
stating truths in sequence, and his appeal seemed responsive to
the heart-beats of his listeners.

Thus the cause, the advocate and the occasion met, and once more
in New England a Southern man was applauded as an American
patriot. With the triple levers of his great soul and mind and
tongue he moved two mighty sections, with all their weights of
passions of victory and passions of defeat, with all their
weights of misconceptions and misjudgments. With his hands he
moved these mighty bodies nearer each to the heart of the
other—nearer to that true Union for which the real heart of this
country, in every part of it, beats with the pulses of a devoted
love, never entirely to be stilled.

Oh, how nobly he must have been inspired as he felt the
“rock-ribbed and iron-bound” prejudice of New England quiver to
the touch of his magic hand; and as her snow began to melt under
the warmth of his great heart, surely he was the sunshine of
this great land!

But, oh, the grief of it—the bitter, bitter grief of it! Just as
we knew how noble and great he was, he sank below the horizon of
life, never to rise again!

I shall always recall him as dying like that lad from Lombardy,
pictured by Browning. I shall think that the South, decked like
a queen in all her jewels of glory and of love, came to his
dying couch and said:

“Thou art a Lombard, my brother! Happy art thou,” she cried,
And smiled like Italy on him. He dreamed in her face and died!

ADDRESS OF WALTER B. HILL, OF MACON, GA.

Love was the law of Henry Grady’s life. His splendid eminence
among his fellows teaches once again that “he who follows love’s
behest far exceedeth all the rest.” Its strongest throbs beat in
the inner circle of the home; but in widening waves they expand
first into friendship, then into public spirit, then into
patriotism, then into philanthropy. When it rises above these
forms of human affection in the incense of worship—we give it
once more the sacred name of love, which it bore at its fireside
shrine. From Henry Grady’s heart, that first and best and truest
and most of all was the home-fond heart, there flowed out in all
the prodigality of his generous soul, and yet with the perfect
adjustment of due degree, all those currents of feeling which
bear so many names and yet are one. And as he loved, so is he
mourned—from the hearth of a desolated home to the borders of a
mighty nation.

What was he to his friends? I dare not answer except to muffle
my own heart in borrowed words—the words of Carlyle over the
bier of the gifted Edward Irving—“His was the bravest, freest,
brotherliest human soul mine ever came in contact with.”

What was he to Atlanta? More than any other man, he built this
city which he rightly loved as he loved no other. Although the
feudal independence of the old Southern life was distinctly
promotive of individualism—yet it was reserved for this young
leader—but one remove from that past generation, to give to our
common country the finest and most conspicuous type which
American citizenship has yet produced of that high civil
virtue—public spirit. It is a virtue untaught in the schools—a
grace and a duty not preached from the pulpit: and yet, as I
study its manifestations in this marvelous man whose suggestion
and sagacity planted the cornucopias of plenty amid industrial
desolation and agricultural poverty—to me it seems far more in
touch with the brotherhood of man and the helpfulness of Christ
than the benevolence which so often degrades the recipient and
the zeal which burns so fiercely for the conversion of opinions.
If the Church does not claim it as the fruit of religion, the
State may be proud to own it as the patriotism of peace.

What was he to Georgia? We naturally think of the material
progress which he inspired throughout the State, and all due
emphasis has been accorded to it. But we must not forget the
other forms of progress to which he was devoted. What a
many-sided man he was! He spent himself to the utmost of his
wonderful resources in behalf of the intellectual culture of the
State—in the earnest but sweet-spirited championship of that
moral issue which he declared was “the most hopeful experiment
ever undertaken in any American city,” in that magnificent
tribute to the value of her young men, which Atlanta has “writ
large” in the stately Association Building. And thus he, whose
pen seemed like the touch of Midas turning to the gold of
material wealth every interest to which it pointed, he teaches
also that imperative lesson of our needy time—that to know and
to be are greater things than to get and to have.

What was he to the South? Let the laureate answer:

The voice of any people is the sword—
The sword that guards them or the sword that beats them down.

More than any other public man, he was the voice of his people.
His eloquence in magnetic speech, and that new art his genius
had created—the oratory of the editorial!—along with the voices
in literature of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page and
Harry Stillwell Edwards, have conquered a hearing at the North.
In glowing utterance and moving story, they have set forth the
true and tender pictures of the old Southern life, the sincere
and single-hearted heroism of the Confederate soldier, the
cordial but self-respecting loyalty of the South of to-day to
the restored Union. They have brought it to pass that in the
contemporary fiction of English-speaking peoples the favorite
scene is amid the old plantations, and the popular hero is the
boy that wore the gray. By these subtle forces of genius,
results have been achieved which no forensic advocacy or party
zeal could ever have accomplished. Old verdicts of condemnation
and prejudice have been reversed; and in their stead,
comprehension has come, patience is coming, confidence will
come.

For the sole but sufficient reason that the whole truth demands
it, I ought to say, that from what seemed to me some of the
implications of his public utterances I had urged upon him my
own dissent; and his letter in reply, permitting me to differ
without a discount in his sincere esteem, is now, more than
ever, one of the treasures of my life.

His work for his people could not have been so adequately done
had office crowned his worth. His advocacy would then have
seemed professional and political. Public station would have put
limitations on him—would have narrowed his audience. A rare
lesson of his life is here—a lesson needed especially among us
whose habit has been to associate official distinction too
exclusively with public service. The people are greater than
Senate or Congress. The official in Washington can speak only to
his party. But the audiences which Grady and his generous
eulogist, Depew, commands show that a man uncrowned with public
office can be great in public life, and perhaps thereby do a
greater work.

What was he to the Nation? Compelled by the limitations of the
hour to answer in one word, I choose this: He it was who first
taught the rising generation of the South to bind the name of
Lincoln with that of Washington “as a sign upon their hand and a
frontlet on their brow.”

We stand face to face with a great mystery. It is the tragedy of
early death, like that of Arthur Henry Hallam, which wrung from
the sweetest singer of our time the noblest poem of sorrow, a
poem whose pages have been for three days past luminous to me
with new and richer meaning. Accepting the evidence of
consciousness in its report of the hopes and aspirations of the
human soul, there can be but two rational hypotheses for this
mystery of an unfinished life. One has been phrased by Renan in
words like this: “There is at the heart of the universe, an
infinite fiend who has filled the hearts of his creatures with
delusions, in order that in awful mockery he may witness the
discomfiture of their despair.” The other theory has been
phrased by Martineau in words like these: “The universe, which
includes and folds us round, is the life-dwelling of an eternal
mind and an infinite love; and every aspiration is but a
prophecy of the reality in that overarching scene where one
incompleteness is rounded out in the greatness of God.” I need
not tell you which of these faiths Henry Grady accepted, or I
accept. I envy not the man who can think that there are in this
universe any shadows dark enough to quench his sunny spirit. I
believe (turning to his picture, on the stage) oh friend of
mine! that I shall look again into that love-lit eye—that I
shall clasp once more thy generous hand!

A poet sings of the echoes of the bugle from cliff and scar as
contrasted with the impact of human influence:

Oh, love, _they_ die on your rich sky,
_They_ faint on hill and field and river;
_Our_ echoes roll from soul to soul
And grow forever and forever!

In all gratitude we can say that we are happier because he
lived; in all humility that we are better because his life
touched ours. And because this is true our children and our
fellow men shall be made happier and better; and so the echoes
of his soul, reduplicated in ten thousand hearts, shall abide, a
gladdening and beneficent force—

Until the stars grow old,
And the suns grow cold,
And the leaves of the judgment book unfold!

SPEECH OF JUDGE HOWARD VAN EPPS.

Ladies and Gentlemen: The lightning brought this message to
Atlanta:

“Henry Grady spends Christmas in heaven.”

Who doubts it? What creature whom the Creator has loved enough
to suffer him to hold a Christian’s faith will question that he
is at this moment in company with the good and great and
virtuous who have preceded him? I looked upon his face, the
pitifulness of death sealed upon it, and as I turned away with
swimming eyes, I saw hidden in a mass of flowers that loving
hands had placed by his side, these words:

O, stainless gentleman!
True man, true hero, true philanthropist!
Thy name was “Great Heart,” honor was thy shield,
Thy golden motto, “Duty without fear!”

And the fragrant breath around him seemed vocal with triumphant
voices, singing, “Reward without stint!” In Athens, the home of
his boyhood, a few months ago, he said, “I am going to
Sunday-school. I want to feel that I am a boy again.” When
seated there the children sang, “Shall we gather at the river?”
and he sank his face in both his hands, and tears flooded
through his fingers. O, “Great Heart,” we know that when your
eyes closed upon the weariness of the terrestrial, they opened
fearless upon the glories of the celestial. I fancy Mr. Hill
sought him without delay, fixing upon him the earnest,
penetrating glance we know so well, but out of which the pained
seriousness has been washed away forever, exclaiming, “Why,
Henry! You? And so soon! Welcome home to our Father’s house!”
Judge Lochrane has doubtless already repaired to his side and
regaled him with a bit of celestial humor that set the seraphs
ashout with laughter. Perhaps he has encountered by this time
Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Davis with arms interlocked, their
differences all adjusted, in wider wisdom, and has been startled
to hear them say: “We were but just now speaking of you and of
the future destiny of the American Republic. Mr. Lincoln had
just remarked that the United States were on the threshold of a
more cordial understanding and a closer union than ever before,
and Mr. Davis has just quoted your prophetic invocation: ‘Let us
resolve to crown the miracles of the past with the spectacle of
a Republic compact, united, indissoluble in the bonds of
love—loving from the Lakes to the Gulf—the wounds of war healed
in every heart as on every hill—serene and resplendent at the
summit of human achievement and earthly glory—blazing out the
path, and making clear the way, up which all the nations of the
earth must come in God’s appointed time!’”

Oh, that he who alone knew how to describe “a perfect
Christmas day,” could come back to his beloved Atlanta and
make it all clear to us—the recognitions, the employments, the
conversations, the blessedness of the redeemed. What sort of
goblet of immortal nectar—of commingled “musk of yellow grain,
of flavor of ripening fruits, fragrance of strawberries,
exquisite odor of violets, aroma of all seasons” of the
celestial year, did the angels brew out of the material of
yesterday to pledge the never-ending fellowships of Heaven in?
What sort of hug of odorous shine did Henry get armsful of
yesterday, when he flung his hands wide apart in the presence
of that Being whom he was wont to call always in his reverent
speech “the Lord God Almighty.”

Oh, well enough for Henry! but for us only the pain of it all,
the bitter pain. I look abroad and Atlanta’s business men seem
grown suddenly older. The cry of the newsboys—“Paper, sir?”—is
almost a sob. I went late at night into the _Constitution_
building and the editors’ faces were graver than they should be,
and the composing-room was heavy with suggestions of widowhood
and orphanage.

I went into a store Christmas eve (for Henry would not have the
children neglected) and the merchant couldn’t find anything he
sought for, and said, apologetically, “I haven’t had any sense
to-day.” The pity of it! We are bereft. Our city is desolate. We
had some great public enterprises in view, that is, Henry had,
and we were going to follow him, and overwork him, as usual.

We are disheartened—almost discouraged. Atlanta is so young and
fiery, almost fierce in her civic energy, and pulls so hard on
the reins. Who will drive for us now?

We will see more clearly after a little, when our grief is
calmer, but now as we see it through our tears, the face and
body of the times are out of joint.

I do not care, in this place and under present limitations, to
speak of his kittenish boyhood; of his idyllic home-life; of his
rollicsome and irresistible humor; of his sympathy and
prodigality of self-sacrifice; of his boundless love to his
fellow men; of his ability as a writer and super-eminence as an
orator; of his pride in Atlanta and services in aid of her
material progress; of his patriotic devotion to the South and to
the Union. I want to ask indulgence to say one thing, which, as
I believe, were he here to prescribe my course and dictate my
utterances, he would have me say. I want to say to noble men of
all parties, north and east and west, speaking here from Grady’s
bier, that the South is no more hostile to the Union than is New
England, and that her love, and sympathy, and desire to help the
dependent class in her midst is deeper, if possible, than the
treason of political agitators who seek to foment race prejudice
to secure party supremacy. “We pledge our lives, our property,
and our sacred honor,” that we will bring wisdom and humanity to
the solution of the grave problem in government which confronts
us, and that we “will carry in honor and peace to the end.” We
repeat again and again, in our sadness, with the sacredness of
our grief for his loss around us, the plea of Georgia’s son, for
patience, for confidence, for sympathy, for loyalty to the
Republic, devoid of suspicion and estrangement, against any
section.

We send greeting to generous New England. They loved him and we
love them for it. We have even forgiven them for being
Republicans. We throw his knightly and Christian gauntlet at
their feet. We challenge her business men, in the name of our
champion of the doctrine of the brotherhood of men and of
Americans, to the national glory-fields of the future—to
fraternal love that will forgive errors of judgment seven times,
and seventy times seven; and to a patriotic pride in and
devotion to every foot of the soil of our magnificent Republic,
that will brook no suspicions and no wrath in all her borders
except when directed against a foreign enemy.

* * * * *

Professor White’s address was delivered under very trying
conditions. He had been suffering from a severe headache all
morning and, in fact, he has been unwell for several days past.
During his speech he suffered painfully, and immediately at its
conclusion he was so much overcome as to be almost completely
prostrated. He was led from the stage to the office of Judge
Will Haight, where he remained until he recovered, leaving for
home later in the afternoon.

The address was delivered with pathos and emotion, and that part
which bore on his close relations with the dead man touched a
responsive chord in every heart in the vast audience that sat in
listening attention to the words of love.

REMARKS OF PROF. H. C. WHITE.

My friends—companions in a common grief: My heart is yet too
full of sorrow’s bitterness to frame in fitting terms the
tribute I would wish to pay the gracious memory of our beloved
dead. Save she who bears my name, he whom we buried yesterday
was my dearest friend on earth. Our friendship, born of close
companionship amid academic groves where we together caught the
inspirations that come to wakening intellects, and nursed the
high resolves that budding youth projects as guides along the
future pathway of the man, was nourished as we grew to man’s
estate, and in these latter years so closely knit by constant
intercourse, reciprocal respect each for the other’s judgment,
wishes and desires, and mutual confidences of hopes and fears,
of sacred interests and fond ambitions, that when he died a
great and fervent glow seemed gone from out of my life, and
desolation laid its icy touch upon my heart.

In recognition of these sacred ties that closely bound our
lives, I am bidden here to-day to join my grief to yours and say
a word of him who was as dear to me as man may be to man.

How can I speak at Henry Grady’s funeral! What may I say that
others have not said; that will not, in our history, be written;
for a Nation mourns him and a continent deplores his untimely
taking off, as the passing of the brightest hope that cheered
the future of our common country’s rehabilitated life.

That he was worthy all the homage cultured men may pay to
genius, talent, intellect, and wit, his works and reputation
that survive beyond the grave will abundantly attest. That he
was worthy all the plaudits honest men accord to truth and
justness, integrity and honor, none dare stand here and
interpose the faintest shadow of a doubt. That he was worthy all
the sacred tears that gentle women and blessed little children
may not refrain from showering on his grave as tribute to his
tenderness, his gentleness, his abounding love for all things
human, we, who knew him best, who shared the golden flood of
sunshine his personality evoked and the sweetest, softest
harmonies of the music of his life, we come, a cloud of
witnesses, to testify.

He was truly great if earthly greatness may be measured by the
lofty aspirations men conceive for bettering their fellow men’s
estate, or by the success with which they realize ideals. His
ambition was of the sort that makes men kings—not petty
officers—and led him to aim to teach a mighty Nation how best
its glorious destiny might be achieved. His ample view looked
far beyond the narrow policies of strife and selfishness and
partisan contentions that mark the statesmanship of lesser men,
and counseled the broader, more effective lines of peace and
love, of patience and forbearance. Had he but lived who may
doubt but that his counsels would have prevailed? This city,
which he loved so well and which he builded, stands, in its fair
proportions, the peer of any on the earth in good and equitable
government, the prosperous home of happy, cultured freemen, as a
type of what he wished his neighbors and his fellow-countrymen
might strive to make themselves in contrast with their fellow
men; worthy to stand among the bravest and the best. Its massive
walls stand witness to his energy, his skill and his success.

He was wise, and thousands came to him for counsel. The
University—his loved and loving Alma Mater—whose smiles had
brightened the endeavors of his youth, called him to her
councils in his maturer years, and to-day she sits upon her
classic hills, a Niobe, in tears and clad in mourning for
him—chiefest among her brilliant sons; foremost among her
guardians and advisers.

He was good; and for all the thousand chords of human emotions
he played upon with facile pen and tongue of matchless
eloquence, he ever held a heart in tender sympathy with
childhood’s innocence, the mother’s love, the lover’s passion,
the maiden’s modesty, the sinner’s penitence and the Christian’s
faith.

One consolation comes to us, his sorrowing friends to-day.
Around his bier no fierce contentions wage unseemly strife for
offices left vacant by his death. He held no place that may be
filled by gift of man. He filled no office within the power of
governments or peoples to bestow. He served the public but was
no public servant. He was a private citizen and occupied a
unique position in the commonwealth, exalted beyond the meed of
patronage, won by virtue of his individual qualities and held at
pleasure of his genius and by the grace of God.

Full well I know that, in God’s providence, no one man’s death
may halt the march of time to ultimate events or change the
increasing purpose that through the ages runs, but this I do
believe, that this man’s death has slowed the dial of our
country’s progress to full fruition of its happiness,
prosperity, and peace. To those of us who stand in history
midway between a national life our fathers founded and wrecked
in throes of revolution and of war, and another in the future,
bright with fair promises but ill-defined as yet in form, with
darkling clouds casting grim shadows across the lines along
which it must be achieved, he was our chosen leader and our
trusted champion. No one of us will be tardy in acknowledgment
that he stood head and shoulders above us all and towered at the
very front. That time will bring a successor in the leadership
we reverently pray and confidently hope, but meanwhile our
generation is camped in bivouac by the path of history awaiting
the birth and training of another chief.

Of all his usefulness to nation, state and town; of all that he
contributed to the glory of our country’s history—the brave
defense of its unsullied past; the wise direction of its present
purposes; the high ideals of its future progress—of these,
others with equal knowledge, may speak with greater eloquence
than I. I come especially to pay a simple tribute (time and
occasion serve for nothing more) to the man himself—my
boyhood’s, manhood’s companion, friend and lover. When on the
day he died I nursed my selfish grief within the sacred
precincts of a home which he had often beautified and rendered
joyous by his presence; in the city of his birth, among the
lanes his boyish feet had trod; amid scenes where his genius had
first been plumed to flight; where he had felt the first touch
of manhood’s aspirations and ambitions; where he had pressed his
maiden suit of sacred love; where his dead hero-father lay at
rest, and where the monumental shaft is reared to the base of
which it was his ardent hope that he might bring his son to
anoint him with the glories and the graces of a hero race—I
thought no other’s sorrow could be as keen as mine. But lo! my
neighbors shared an universal grief and draped their homes with
sable tokens of their mourning hearts; the very children in the
streets stopped in their Christmas play and spoke in whispers as
in the presence of a dread calamity; and here, I find myself but
one among a multitude to whom that great and noble heart had
given of its gracious bounty and drawn them to himself by bonds
of everlasting love that caused their tears to flow as freely as
my own, in tribute to the sweetness, gentleness, magnetic
joyousness of him that we have lost.

He was the very embodiment of love. A loving man; a man most
lovable. Affection for his fellows welled from out his heart and
overwhelmed in copious flood all brought within its touch. His
love inspired counter-love in men of all degree. The aged marked
his coming with a brightening smile; the young fell down and
worshiped him. Unselfishness, the chiefest virtue men may
claim—it carries all the others in its train—was possessed by
him in unsurpassed degree. His generosity passed quick and far
beyond the lines marked out by charity and overflowed the limits
fixed by prudence. In fine, the gentler graces all were his:

His gentleness, his tenderness, his fair courtesy,
Were like a ring of virtues ’bout him set,
And God-like charity the center where all met.

Science and religion alike declare that force is indestructible.
Some catch from one and some the other the inspiration that
gives them faith and blessed hope that that great thing we call
the Soul may live and work beyond that accident which we call
Death, which comes with all the terrors of unfathomable mystery
to free the fretting spirit from its carnal chains.

He had no special knowledge—nor cared for none—of scientific
theory or philosophic speculation, but he had gained from deep
religious thought—not technical theology perhaps, but true
religion, the same that taught him to “visit the widows and
fatherless in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted
from the world”—he had gained from this a deep, abiding
conviction in a life beyond the grave. That this was true I
know; for often we have talked of these great mysteries and,
closeted together, have weighed the doubts the increasing
knowledge of the centuries has brought, and I have never known a
man whose convictions were as firm, and who, frankly and
squarely meeting every doubt, retained unshaken faith with all
his heart, soul and mind.

He held it truth with him who sings,
To one clear harp in divers tones,
That men _must_ rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

How far this faith held him in loyalty to churchly creed—the
necessary corollary of such faith as his—others are more
competent than I to tell.

Great Spirit—that which was loose but yesterday from mortal
tenement we sadly laid to rest—thy sorrowing friends send after
thee, along the shimmering lines that guide thy flight from
earth to glory, this fervent prayer—tempering our agony and
comforting our desolation—that God, in His infinite wisdom, may
count thy faith deserving such reward in Heaven as we would
measure to thy works on earth.

God rest thee, princely gentlemen! God keep thee, peerless
friend!

When Mr. Graves was introduced, the audience broke into applause. His fame as an orator, and his intimate friendship with Mr. Grady were known, and his eloquent tribute to his dead friend moved the hearts of his hearers as they had seldom by words been moved before. Upon being introduced by Mayor Glenn, Mr. Graves said:

SPEECH OF HON. JOHN TEMPLE GRAVES.

I am one among the thousands who loved him, and I stand with the
millions who lament his death.

I loved him in the promise of his glowing youth, when, across my
boyish vision he walked with winning grace, from easy effort to
success. I loved him in the flush of splendid manhood when a
Nation hung upon his words—and now, with the dross of human
friendship smitten in my soul—I love him best of all as he lies
yonder under the December skies, with face as tranquil and with
smile as sweet as patrial ever wore.

In this sweet and solemn hour all the rare and kindly adjectives
that blossomed in the shining pathway of his pen, seem to have
come from every quarter of the continent to lay themselves in
loving tribute at their master’s feet; but rich as the music
that they bring, all the cadences of our eulogy

Sigh for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still.

And here to-day, within this hall glorified by the echoes of his
eloquence, standing to answer the impulse of my heart in the
roll-call of his friends, and stricken with my emptiness of
words, I know that, when the finger of God touched his eyelids
into sleep, there gathered a silence upon the only lips that
could weave the sunbright story of his days, or mete sufficient
eulogy to the incomparable richness of his life.

I agree with Patrick Collins that he was the most brilliant son
of this Republic. If the annals of these times are told with
truth, they will give him place as the phenomenon of his period,
the Admirable Crichton of the age in which he lived. No
eloquence has equaled his since Sargent Prentiss faded from the
earth. No pen has plowed such noble furrow in his country’s
fallow fields since the wrist of Horace Greeley rested; no age
of the Republic has witnessed such marvelous conjunction of a
magical pen with the velvet splendor of a mellow tongue, and
although the warlike rival of these wondrous forces never rose
within his life, it is writ of all his living, that the noble
fires of his genius were lighted in his boyhood from the gleam
that died upon his father’s sword.

I have loved to follow, and I love to follow now the pathway of
that diamond pen as it flashed like an inspiration over every
phase of life in Georgia. It touched the sick body of a desolate
and despairing agriculture with the impulse of a better method,
and the farmer, catching the glow of promise in his words, left
off sighing and went to singing in his fields, until at last the
better day has come, and as the sunshine melts into his harvests
with the tender rain, the heart of humanity is glad in his hope
and the glow on his fields seems the smile of the Lord. Its
brave point went with cheerful prophecy and engaging manliness
into the ranks of toil, until the workman at his anvil felt the
dignity of labor pulse the somber routine of the hours, and the
curse of Adam softening in the faith of silver sentences, became
the blessing and the comfort of his days. Into the era of
practical politics it dashed with the grace of an earlier
chivalry, and in an age of pushing and unseemly scramble, it
woke the spirit of a loftier sentiment, while around the glow of
splendid narrative and the charm of entrancing plea there grew a
goodlier company of youth, linked to the Republic’s nobler
legends and holding fast that generous loyalty which builds the
highest bulwark of the State.

First of all the instruments which fitted his genius to
expression was this radiant pen. Long after it had blazed his
way to eminence and usefulness, he waked the power of that
surpassing oratory which has bettered all the sentiment of his
country and enriched the ripe vocabulary of the world. Nothing
in the history of human speech will equal the stately steppings
of his eloquence into glory. In a single night he caught the
heart of the country into its warm embrace, and leaped from a
banquet revelry into national fame. It is, at last, the crowning
evidence of his genius, that he held to the end, unbroken, the
high fame so easily won, and sweeping from triumph unto triumph,
with not one leaf of his laurels withered by time or staled by
circumstance, died on yesterday—the foremost orator of all the
world.

It is marvelous, past all telling how he caught the heart of the
country in the fervid glow of his own! All the forces of our
statesmanship have not prevailed for union like the ringing
speeches of this bright, magnetic man. His eloquence was the
electric current over which the positive and negative poles of
American sentiment were rushing to a warm embrace. It was the
transparent medium through which the bleared eyes of sections
were learning to see each other clearer and to love each other
better. He was melting bitterness in the warmth of his patrial
sympathies, sections were being linked in the logic of his
liquid sentences, and when he died he was literally loving a
Nation into peace.

Fit and dramatic climax to a glorious mission, that he should
have lived to carry the South’s last and greatest message to the
center of the Nation’s culture, and then, with the gracious
answer to his transcendent service locked in his loyal heart,
come home to die among the people he had served! Fitter still,
that, as he walked in final triumph through the streets of his
beloved city, he should have caught upon his kingly head that
wreath of Southern roses—richer jewels than Victoria
wears—plucked by the hands of Georgia women, borne by the hands
of Georgia men, and flung about him with a loving tenderness
that crowned him for his burial, that, in the unspeakable
fragrance of Georgia’s full and sweet approval, he might “draw
the drapery of his couch about him, and lie down to pleasant
dreams.”

If I should seek to touch the core of all his greatness, I would
lay my hand upon his heart. I should speak of his humanity—his
almost inspired sympathies, his sweet philanthropy and the noble
heartfulness that ran like a silver current through his life.
His heart was the furnace where he fashioned all his glowing
speech. Love was the current that sent his golden sentences
pulsing through the world, and in the honest throb of human
sympathies he found the anchor that held him steadfast to all
things great and true. He was the incarnate triumph of a
heartful man.

I thank God, as I stand above my buried friend, that there is
not one ignoble memory in all the shining pathway of his fame!
In all the glorious gifts that God Almighty gave him, not one
was ever bent to willing service in unworthy cause. He lived to
make the world about him better. With all his splendid might he
helped to build a happier, heartier and more wholesome sentiment
among his kind. And in fondness, mixed with reverence, I believe
that the Christ of Calvary, who died for men, has found a
welcome sweet for one who fleshed within his person the golden
spirit of the New Commandment and spent his powers in glorious
living for his race.

O brilliant and incomparable Grady! We lay for a season thy
precious dust beneath the soil that bore and cherished thee, but
we fling back against all our brightening skies the thoughtless
speech that calls thee dead! God reigns and his purpose lives,
and although these brave lips are silent here, the seeds sown in
this incarnate eloquence will sprinkle patriots through the
years to come, and perpetuate thy living in a race of nobler
men!

But all our words are empty, and they mock the air. If we would
speak the eulogy that fills this day, let us build within this
city that he loved, a monument tall as his services, and noble
as the place he filled. Let every Georgian lend a hand, and as
it rises to confront in majesty his darkened home, let the widow
who weeps there be told that every stone that makes it has been
sawn from the solid prosperity that he builded, and that the
light which plays upon its summit is, in afterglow, the sunshine
that he brought into the world.

And for the rest—silence. The sweetest thing about his funeral
was that no sound broke the stillness, save the reading of the
Scriptures and the melody of music. No fire that can be kindled
upon the altar of speech can relume the radiant spark that
perished yesterday. No blaze born in all our eulogy can burn
beside the sunlight of his useful life. After all there is
nothing grander than such living.

I have seen the light that gleamed at midnight from the
headlight of some giant engine rushing onward through the
darkness, heedless of opposition, fearless of danger, and I
thought it was grand. I have seen the light come over the
eastern hills in glory, driving the lazy darkness like mist
before a sea-born gale, till leaf and tree, and blade of grass
glittered in the myriad diamonds of the morning ray; and I
thought it was grand.

I have seen the light that leaped at midnight athwart the
storm-swept sky, shivering over chaotic clouds, mid howling
winds, till cloud and darkness and the shadow-haunted earth
flashed into mid-day splendor, and I knew it was grand. But the
grandest thing, next to the radiance that flows from the
Almighty Throne, is the light of a noble and beautiful life,
wrapping itself in benediction ’round the destinies of men, and
finding its home in the blessed bosom of the Everlasting God!

SPEECH OF GOVERNOR GORDON.

Mr. Chairman and Fellow-Citizens: The news of Henry Grady’s
death reached me at a quiet country retreat in a distant section
of the State. The grief of that rural community, as deep and
sincere as the shock produced by his death was great and
unexpected, told more feelingly and eloquently than any words of
mine possibly can, the universality of the love and admiration
of all her people for Georgia’s peerless son.

It is no exaggeration to say that the humblest and the highest,
the poorest and richest—all classes, colors and creeds, with an
unspeakable sorrow, mourn his death as a public calamity. It is
no exaggeration to say that no man lives who can take his place.
It is no extravagant eulogy to declare that scarcely any
half-dozen men, by their combined efforts, can fill in all
departments the places which he filled in his laborious and
glorious life.

His wonderful intellect, enabling him, without apparent effort,
to master the most difficult and obtuse public questions, and to
treat them with matchless grace and power; his versatile genius,
which made him at once the leader in great social reforms, as
well as in gigantic industrial movements—that genius which made
him at once the eloquent advocate, the logical expounder, the
wise organizer, the vigorous executive—all these rich and
unrivaled endowments, justify in claiming for him a place among
the greatest and most gifted of this or any age.

But splendid as were his intellectual abilities, it is the
boundless generosity of his nature, his sweet and loving spirit,
his considerate and tender charity, exhaustless as a fountain of
living waters, refreshing and making happy all hearts around
him, these are the characteristics on which I love most to
dwell. It is no wonder that his splendid genius attracted the
gaze and challenged the homage of the continent. It is perhaps
even a less wonder that a man with such boundless sympathies for
his fellow men and so prodigal with his own time and talent and
money in the service of the public, should be so universally and
tenderly loved.

The career of Henry Grady is more than unique. It constitutes a
new chapter in human experience. No private citizen in the whole
eventful history of this Republic ever wore a chaplet so
fadeless or linked his name so surely with deathless
immortality. His name as a journalist and orator, his brilliant
and useful life, his final crowning triumph, especially the
circumstances of martyrdom surrounding his death, making it like
that of the giant of holy writ, as we trust, more potential than
ever in intellectual prowess of magic of the living man—all
these will conspire not more surely to carry his fame to
posterity, than will his deeds of charity and ready responses to
those who needed his effective help, serve to endear to our
hearts and memories, as long as life shall last, the memory of
Henry W. Grady.

* * * * *

Governor Gordon’s tribute was the last of the sad occasion.

At its conclusion Dr. H. C. Morrison pronounced the benediction, and the curtain was drawn on the final public exercises of the most memorable funeral service the South has ever known.

But the memory of the loved and illustrious dead will linger long with his bereaved people.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MEMORIAL MEETING AT MACON, GA.

-------

A GRADY Memorial Meeting was held at Macon, Ga., on the evening of Thursday, December 26, 1889. The Academy of Music was filled with an assemblage of citizens of all classes. The meeting was called to order by Mr. F. H. Richardson, and the exercises were opened with an impressive prayer by Rev. T. R. Kendall, pastor of Mulberry Street Church. In announcing the object of the meeting, Mr. Richardson, who presided, said:

ADDRESS OF MR. RICHARDSON.

Fellow-Citizens: We have assembled to-night to honor the memory
of a good and useful man; to express our sincere regrets that
death has closed a high career in the meridian of its splendor;
to voice our sympathy with the grief which this public loss has
carried to every part of our State.

This is an occasion without precedent in the history of Macon.
Never before have its people given such tribute to the memory of
a private citizen. But when has such a private citizen lived,
when has such a one died in Georgia? In speaking of my dear,
dead friend I trust I do not pass the bounds of exact and proper
statement when I say that there was not within the limits of
these United States any man unburdened by office, unadorned by
the insignia of triumphs in the fields of war, or the arena of
politics, whose death would have been so generally deplored as
is that of Henry W. Grady. It will be our privilege and pleasure
to hear testimony of his genius and his virtues from the
representatives of five organizations; the Press, the Chamber of
Commerce of Macon, the resident alumni of the State University,
the City Government, and the Chi Phi Fraternity. Each of these
has good reason to honor the memory of Henry Grady. The press
can fashion no eulogy richer than his desert, for his was the
most illustrious pen that has flashed in Southern journalism
during this generation. The Chamber of Commerce cannot accord
him too much praise, for, though himself unskilled in the
science of trade, he was the chief promoter of public enterprise
in his city and set an example worthy the emulation of any man
whose ambition looks to the promotion of commercial and
industrial progress. Surely the Alumni of the State University
should honor him, for he was the most famous man who has left
the classic halls of Athens in many a year. It is well that the
City Government joins in this general tribute to the lamented
dead. He led his own city to high ideals and to large
achievements. He preached the gospel of liberality as well as
the creed of progress. While his devotion to his own city was
supreme, from his lips there fell no word of scorn or malice for
any other community. Let us emulate the catholicity of his
patriotism. Atlanta was its central force and fire, but it
extended to all Georgia, to all these States and, passing beyond
the boundaries of his own county, was transformed into a love
for all mankind. The Chi Phi Fraternity had much cause to love
Henry Grady. Only those of us who know the full meaning of the
mystic bonds of that brotherhood can appreciate the ardor and
enthusiasm of his devotion to it. There was that in him which
was nobler and worthier of commemoration than even his radiant
genius. Powerful as he was with the pen, persuasive as he was in
his masterful control of the witchery of eloquence, fascinating
as was his personality, he had a still better claim to honor
than could be founded on these distinctions. After all, the best
fame is that which, though not sought, is won by goodness,
charity, and brotherly love. Leigh Hunt’s Abou Ben Adhem is
lovelier than the mightiest of the Moorish Kings. Henry Grady
concerned himself to do good unto others. He kindled the fire on
cold hearth stones, he cared for the sick and the forsaken, he
visited the prisoner, he carried consolation to the desolate.
His works of mercy, tenderness, and love do live after him, and
they are the crowning beauty of his work in this world. The tear
of gratitude that trickles down the cheek of the orphan is a
purer jewel than ever sparkled in the crown of political fame.
The simple thanks of the friendless and oppressed make sweeter
music to the soul than the applause of senates. These priceless
rewards were showered upon him in recognition of many an untold
deed of charity and grace. His life has been concluded when,
according to human wisdom, it seemed most desirable that he
should linger among the walks of men. Silence has set its seal
on his eloquent lips when their words seemed sweetest. His
great, tender heart has been hushed forever, when from the life
it quickened there were going forth influences of large and
increasing beneficence.

* * * * *

Capt. J. L. HARDEMAN was then introduced, and he read the following resolutions framed by the committee from the meeting of the various bodies held last Tuesday:

RESOLUTIONS.