Chapter II (4)

His greatness cannot be measured by his speeches, though they
were so masterful that they form a portion of his country’s
history. It will rather be gauged by that patient, brilliant
daily work, which made it possible for him to command the
nation’s ear, that power of which these public utterances were
but the exponents; his daily toil in his private sanctum in the
stately building of the _Constitution_, that magnificent
manufactory of public thought, which he wielded as a weaver does
his shuttle. A small and scantily furnished room, with nothing
in it save Grady, his genius and his God,—and yet thus
illumined, it warmed with the light of fraternal love both
sections of a Republic, compared to which that of historic
Greece was but as a perfumed lamp to the noontide splendor of
the sun. As a journalist Mr. Grady had no superior in America.
As a writer he exercised the princely prerogative of genius
which is to create and not obey the laws of rhetoric. As well
attempt to teach the nightingale to sing by note, or track the
summer lightning as we do the sun, as measure Grady’s style by
any rhetorician’s rule. I have thought that Mr. Grady was more
of an orator than a writer, and brilliant as his success in
journalism was, it was but the moonlight which reflected the sun
that dawned only to be obscured by death. Certainly no man in
any country or in any age, ever won fame as an orator faster
than he. With a wide reputation as a writer, but scarcely any as
a speaker, even in his own State, he appeared one night at a
banquet in New York, made a speech of twenty minutes, and the
next day was known throughout the United States as the foremost
of Southern orators. No swifter stride has been made to fame
since the days of David, for like that heroic stripling, with
the sling of courage and the stone of truth, he slew
Sectionalism, the Goliath which had so long threatened and
oppressed his people.

Since Appomattox two historic speeches have been made by
Southern men; the one was that delivered in the Congress of the
United States upon the proposition to strike from the general
amnesty of the government the name of Jefferson Davis, when
Benjamin H. Hill broke the knightliest lance ever shivered in a
people’s honor, full on the haughty crest of the plumed knight;
the other was the Boston speech of Mr. Grady which, like a magic
key, will yet unlock the shackles that have so long manacled a
people who, strangest paradox in history, were enslaved by the
emancipation of their slaves. The logic of Hill was powerful as
the club of Hercules; the eloquence of Grady was irresistible as
the lyre of Orpheus.

My countrymen, if it shall be written in the history of America
that by virtue of the genius of her Toombs and Cobb and Brown,
on the breast of our native State was cradled a revolution which
rocked a continent, upon another page of that history it will be
recorded that Georgia’s Grady was the Moses who led the Southern
people through a wilderness of weakness and of want at least to
the Pisgah whence, with prophetic eye, he could discern a New
South true to the traditions of the past as was the steel which
glittered on the victorious arm, at Manassas, but whose hopeful
hearts and helpful hands shall transform desolation into wealth
and convert the defeat of one section of our common country into
the haughty herald of that country’s future rank in the
civilization of the world.

Even, when prompted by the tender relations of the fraternity
which I represent, I cannot trust myself to speak of Mr. Grady’s
private and social life. He was my friend. Nearly ten years
since his kindly glowing words revealed to me an ambition, which
I had scarcely dared to confess unto myself. As the summer days
still linger with us, so does the daily intercourse which it was
my fortune to enjoy with him some three months since—seem yet to
“compass me about.” By the royal right of intellect he commanded
the homage of my admiration; with the clarion voice of
patriotism he challenged my reverence, but with the magnetism of
his munificent manhood he bade Confidence, that sentry which
guards the human heart, surrender this citadel at discretion. I
trust that it will not be deemed inappropriate for me, man of
the world as I am, to bear my public testimony to the power of
Christianity illustrated in his life. Familiar in his youth with
every phase of pleasure, with the affluent blood of early
manhood yet running riot through his veins, with the temptations
of a continent spread like a royal feast, to which his talent
and his fame gave him easy access, yet when he bowed his head in
reverence to the meek and lowly Nazarene, his life was the
unimpeachable witness of his creed. A thousand sermons to me
were concentrated in the humanized Christianity of his faith and
his works. And God was good to him.—The magnificent success of
the Piedmont Exposition was to him the exponent of that
industrial progress which he had labored to establish. The
bountiful harvest of this closing year had seemed to set the
seal of God’s commendation upon his labors for the agricultural
interests of the South. Such was his fame that sixty million
Americans revered him as a patriot. With a wife beautiful and
brilliant, adoring him as only a woman can love a genius whom
she comprehends; with two children just verging into
adolescence, and reverencing him as an neophyte does his faith;
with the highest official station within his grasp; with the
curule chair of the Governorship already opening its arms to
receive him; with the future lifting the senatorial toga to
drape his eloquence; with possibilities of the White House
flashing through the green vista of the coming years,—with all
of these he made no murmur at the summons of his God.

A widow weeps where yesterday a wife adored. Two orphans mourn
to-day where yesterday two children leaned upon a father’s arm.
A nation’s hope is turned to mourning. It needed the great heart
of Grady to gently murmur, “Thy will, not mine, be done.”

But by all that he has accomplished, and by all that he has
projected, which the coming years will yet work out, I tell you
to-night, my fellow Georgians, that Henry Grady still lives an
abiding influence in the destinies of his country. Greatest
enemy of monopoly while he lived, the grandest of all monopolies
shall be his after death, for every industrial enterprise
hereafter inaugurated in the South must pay its royalty of fame
to him. Sleep on, my friend, my brother, brilliant and beloved;
let no distempered dream of unaccomplished greatness haunt thy
long last sleep. The country that you loved, that you redeemed
and disenthralled, will be your splendid and ever growing
monument, and the blessings of a grateful people will be the
grand inscription, which shall grow longer as that monument
rises higher among the nations of the earth. Wherever the peach
shall blush beneath the kisses of the Southern sun, wherever the
affluent grape shall don the royal purple of Southern
sovereignty, a votive offering from the one and a rich libation
from the other, the grateful husbandman will tender unto you.
The music of no machinery shall be heard within this Southland
which does not chant a pæan in your praise. Wherever Eloquence,
the deity whom this people hath ever worshiped, shall retain a
temple, no pilgrim shall enter there, save he bear thy dear name
as a sacred shibboleth on his lips. So long as patriotism shall
remain the shining angel who guards the destinies of our
Republic, her starry finger will point to Grady on Plymouth
Rock, for Fame will choose to chisel his statue there, standing
as the sentinel whom God had placed to keep eternal watch over
the liberties of a re-united people!

* * * * *

The exercises were concluded with the benediction by the Rev. G. A. Nunnally, D.D., President of Mercer University.

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PERSONAL TRIBUTES.

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THOUGHTS ON H. W. GRADY.

BY B. H. SAMETT.

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MEN of genius often die early. Keats died at twenty-six, Shelly at thirty, Byron at thirty-six, and Burns at thirty-seven. Henry Grady was born May 24th, 1850, and hence was a little more than thirty-nine years of age at his death.

In the opinion of many, no more brilliant man has lived since Byron died. In the power of intense, beautiful and striking expression he has had no equal among us. Had he turned his attention to poetry he would have written something as beautiful as Childe Harold.

Take, for instance, a sentence or two, written eight or ten years ago, in an article from New York to the _Constitution_, entitled “The Atheistic Tide.” The whole article is exceptionally brilliant. I select at random a paragraph or two:

“We have stripped all the earth of mystery and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitch its crucible for an analysis of the Soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical Gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine, a vastness and a vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret—felt its most hidden pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstration—what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last, having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders, as the shores of a star that lights the spaces beyond our vision are to us to-day. The Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder—ships that were freighted in the heart of Africa lie in our harbors, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders of Babel—a letter slips round the earth in ninety days and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean—we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined—we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe.”

This brilliancy, this dazzling, meteoric imagination, made against his reputation in the earlier years of his career. The impression got abroad that he was simply fanciful and superficial—that he could paint his productions in the gorgeous imagery of poetry, but that he had no great intellectual strength and force. It took some time to dispel this illusion. It was only after the great breadth of his mind displayed itself in his powerful speeches in New York, Dallas, Tex., Augusta, Ga., and Boston, that the public began to see that, back behind his rich and brilliant imagination, there was a masterful intellect, able to comprehend the profoundest questions of social and political policy.

His development as an orator was indeed phenomenal. Nothing has ever been known like it since Sheridan quit play-writing to enter the English House of Commons, and delivered, according to the judgment of Fox and Burke, the most eloquent oration ever spoken to an English auditory. Grady’s whole preparation had been in the line of journalism. He had never practiced at the bar, in the forum, or on the hustings. Yet such was his genius, that, from the very moment he got before the American public, he leaped from the base to the very summit of oratorical fame.

His oratory was _sué generis_. Like all great men he had no prototype. There was nothing sonorous in his tones of voice—he had nothing of the declamatory pomp of Toombs, the stately periods of Hill, the slow, measured cadences of Stephens. Like Mark Antony he talked along; but such talk—as sweet as the harp of Orpheus whose melody swayed the trees of the forest and rent asunder the solid rocks. Like a fountain unsealed, his thought flowed forth in gushing opulence, and in every rhythmic period his soul voiced itself in perfect music. He could awake all the sleeping passions of the heart and set them astir with his own enthusiasm. Like a pendulum, he swung betwixt a smile and a tear, now convulsing all with his humor and anon melting all with his pathos.

Added to such brilliant gifts as a writer and a speaker, he had the genius of common sense. He could project a movement of great practical interest, and perfect and accomplish it with the same marvellous facility that he could indite a morning editorial. He saw in our uncut quarries the marble halls and palaces of the rich—in our mountains of ore the matchless steam engines and their tracks of steel along which our growing commerce was to be borne to the distant marts of the world—in our waving forests of pine, the cities of majestic splendor and beauty that were to adorn and enrich our vast domain. As Webster said of Hamilton, in reference to the public credit, he touched the dead corpse of our industries and they arose and stood upon their feet.

To all these gifts of head, there was an added heart of boundless sympathies. In his writings there is always an undertone of sentiment, bespeaking a moral nature as opulent as was his intellectual endowment. His imagination caught up the good, the beautiful and the true. With the alchemy of his genius he could transmute the simplest flower into a preacher of righteousness, and get from it some lessons of wisdom and truth. To lift up and crown humanity was the supremest aspiration of his life. This ruling passion was strong in death, and even in the delirium preceding dissolution, his brain was rife with its own desiring phantasies, and he died in the midst of dreams born of yearnings to help and bless the needy and the heavy laden.

Perhaps no one has lived among us who possessed more of the elements which go to make up the hero, the popular idol. Noble in presence, gracious in manner, gentle in spirit, manly in everything, he commanded not only the admiration but the love of all. If all who tenderly loved him could lay a garland upon his grave his ashes would rest beneath a mountain of flowers.

To die so wept and mourned were more to be desired than the glittering honors of splendid obsequies. To live, as he will live, embalmed in the immortality of love, is better far than enshrinement in the cold emblazonry of marble.

Loving hands and hearts will erect to his memory the granite shaft, cut and chiselled with words of eulogy, but his most enduring monument is his grand, historic life, standing out imperishably based upon the affections and the love of a grateful people, and pointing unborn generations to the same heights of purity and honor he so worthily attained.

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SEARGENT S. PRENTISS AND HENRY W. GRADY.

_SIMILARITY OF GENIUS AND PATRIOTISM._

BY JOSEPH F. PON.

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HISTORY repeats itself, and genius does the same. The light which shines with electric brilliancy in one portion of a country, though suddenly extinguished, soon blazes forth with life and hope, in genial air and under propitious skies.

Eminent in illustration of this truth, is the very great similarity in the mental structure, the physical temperament and the personal qualities of Seargent S. Prentiss and Henry W. Grady. The first was born in bleak and sterile Maine, and yet his great heart was not hemmed in by the hills around which clung the memories of his Pilgrim fathers. It took within its spacious chambers, and nurtured in patriotic affection the new-found friends of his adopted home, in the semi-tropical valleys of the lower Mississippi. The other was born on Georgia soil, and Southern traditions, memories and methods of thought seemed but a second nature with him. It did not prevent his fullness to the brim with that Promethean flame and “milk of human kindness,” which caused him in boundless Americanism, to wear a constant smile, born of infinite hope and faith in the future of a great Republic, stretching from the rugged coast of Maine to the broad plazas of Texas—from the noble forests of Oregon to the coral reefs of Florida.

Each of these men combined with deep research and intuitive perception, an imagination as luxuriant as a tropical garden, and while each put forth “thoughts that breathed in words that burned,” he was ever careful in the exercise of his great gifts, that they should always be directed in the promotion of human happiness, and to stimulate the loftiest human exertion. When Prentiss or Grady spoke every listener felt the touch of the master hand as it played upon his heart-strings—felt the tingling of the blood in his fingers’ ends, and could not fail to enjoy the delightful silence of universal and spontaneous admiration. The eloquence of these two men was not of that school which deals in thundergusts of word-painting, devoid of reason, sense, or consistency. Their ideas are always comely, well-proportioned, clear in outline and yet not angular in structure. They spoke for God and humanity—for liberty—for love—for law. They did not pervert their great gifts from the purposes that Nature intended. They used their magic power to smooth and soften the rough, hard places of human life, to promote all ends and objects catholic, worthy, commendable—to charm and persuade the morose and unwilling—to denounce like Nathan—to warn like Cassandra—to encourage like an angel of light. When either of them spoke, he seemed to realize the sublimest purpose of his mission; and condensed his giant electric power, as the heat charges the summer cloud with the bolts that are soon to flash and shiver.

Prentiss died in the same year that Grady was born; and when he first closed his brilliant career at forty-two years of age, the second was but a smiling infant six weeks old. Each, cut off before he had reached the zenith, was

A mighty vessel foundered in the calm,
Its freight half given to the world.

The glorious sun of each “went down while it was yet day.”

Some extracts are here given, from an address delivered by Prentiss before the New England Society of New Orleans, on December 22, 1845. These will be followed by some from Grady’s Boston speech. Prentiss at the time named, was about the same age that Grady was when he died. In opening Prentiss said: “This is a day dear to the sons of New England, and ever held by them in sacred remembrance. On this day, from every quarter of the globe, they gather in spirit around the Rock of Plymouth, and hang upon the urn of their Pilgrim fathers, the garlands of filial gratitude and affection. We have assembled for the purpose of participating in this honorable duty—of performing this pious pilgrimage. To-day we will visit that memorable spot. We gaze upon the place where a feeble band of persecuted exiles founded a mighty nation; and our hearts will exult with proud gratification, as we remember that on that barren shore our ancestors planted not only empire, but freedom.

“Of the future but little is known; clouds and darkness rest upon it. We yearn to become acquainted with its hidden secrets—we stretch out our arms toward its shadowy inhabitants—we invoke our posterity, but they answer us not. We turn for relief to the past, that mighty reservoir of men and things. There we are introduced into Nature’s vast laboratory, and witness her elemental labors. We mark with interest the changes in continents and oceans, by which she has notched the centuries. With curious wonder we gaze down the long aisles of the past, upon the generations that are gone. We behold as in a magic glass, men in form and feature like ourselves, actuated by the same motives, urged by the same passions, busily engaged in shaping out both their own destinies and ours. We approach them, and they refuse not our invocation. We hold converse with the wise philosophers, the sage legislators, and divine poets. But most of all among the innumerable multitudes that peopled the past, we seek our own ancestors, drawn toward them by an irresistible sympathy. With reverent solicitude we examine into their character and actions, and as we find them worthy or unworthy, our hearts swell with pride or our cheeks glow with shame.”

Speaking of the simplicity of the Pilgrim habits, Prentiss goes on: “In founding their colony they sought neither wealth nor conquest; but only peace and freedom. From the moment they touched the shore, they labored with orderly, systematic and persevering industry. They cultivated, without a murmur, a poor and ungrateful soil, which even now yields but a stubborn obedience to the dominion of the plow. They brought with them neither wealth nor power, but the principles of civil and religious freedom. They cherished, cultivated and developed them to a full and luxuriant maturity; and furnished them to their posterity as the only sure and permanent foundations for free government. We are proud of our native land, and turn with fond affection to its rocky shores. Behold the thousand temples of the Most High, that nestle in its happy valleys and crown its swelling hills. See how their glittering spires pierce the sky—celestial conductors ready to avert the lightning of an angry heaven!”

Himself the son of a ship-builder, he thus speaks of the enterprise of the Pilgrims: “They have wrestled with Nature, till they have prevailed against her, and compelled her reluctantly to reverse her own laws. The sterile soil has become productive under their sagacious culture, and the barren rock, astonished, finds itself covered with luxuriant and unaccustomed verdure. Upon the banks of every river they build temples of industry, and stop the squanderings of the spendthrift waters. They bind the Naiades of the brawling stream; they drive the Dryades from their accustomed haunts, and force them to desert each favorite grove: for from river, creek, and bay they are busy transforming the crude forests into staunch and gallant vessels. From every inlet and indenture along the rocky shore, swim forth these ocean-birds—born in the wildwood—fledged upon the wave. Behold how they spread their white pinions to the favoring breeze, and wing their flight to every quarter of the globe—the carrier pigeons of the world!”

But lastly how brimming with pathos, how pregnant with patriotic ardor, is the following: “Glorious New England! Thou art still true to thy ancient fame, and worthy of thy ancestral honors. We thy children have assembled in this far-distant land to celebrate thy birthday. A thousand fond associations throng upon us, roused by the spirit of the hour. On thy pleasant valleys rest, like sweet dews of the morning, the gentle recollections of our early life; around thy hills and mountains cling like gathering mists the mighty memories of the Revolution; and far away on the horizon of the past, gleam like thine own Northern lights, the awful virtues of our Pilgrim sires. But while we devote this day to the remembrance of our native land, we forget not that in which our happy lot is cast. We exult in the reflection that, though we count by thousands the miles which separate us from our birthplace, still our country is the same. We have but changed our chamber in the paternal mansion; in all its rooms we are at home, and all who inhabit it are our brothers. We are no exiles meeting upon the banks of a foreign river, to swell its waters with our home-sick tears. Here floats the same banner which nestled above our boyish heads, except that its mighty folds are wider, and its glittering stars increased in number.”

The sound of this eloquent tongue was stilled, but the “divine afflatus” with which it was tuned was transferred to, and continued in another. Near the birthplace of the noble Prentiss, and surrounded by those who were proud of his fame, Grady referred to those surroundings and the objects of his visit, when he said: “Happy am I that this mission has brought my feet at last to press New England’s historic soil, and my eyes to the knowledge of her beauty and her thrift. Here within touch of Plymouth Rock and Bunker Hill—where Webster thundered and Longfellow sang, Emerson thought, and Channing preached—here in the cradle of American letters, and almost of American liberty, I hasten to make the obeisance that every American owes New England, when first he stands uncovered in her mighty presence. Strange apparition! This stern and unique figure, carved from the ocean and the wilderness, its majesty kindling and growing amid the storms of winters and of wars,—until at last the gloom was broken, its beauty disclosed in the sunshine, and the heroic workers rested at its base,—while startled kings and emperors gazed and marveled that from the rude touch of this handful, cast on a bleak and unknown shore, should have come the embodied genius of human government, and the perfected model of human liberty! God bless the memory of those immortal workers, and prosper the fortunes of their living sons, and perpetuate the inspiration of their handiwork.”

Faithful to the memories of his childhood, and to the devotion of his mature years, visions of his distant home rise to his mental eye, and with a master’s magic touch he spreads the picture on the glowing canvas: “Far to the South, Mr. President, separated from this section by a line once defined in irrepressible difference, once traced in fratricidal blood, and now, thank God, but a vanishing shadow, lies the fairest and richest domain of this earth. It is the home of a brave and hospitable people. There is centered all that can please or prosper human kind. A perfect climate above a fertile soil, yields to the husbandman every product of the temperate zone. There, by night, the cotton whitens beneath the stars, and the wheat locks the sunshine in its bearded sheaf. In the same field the clover steals the fragrance of the wind, and the tobacco catches the quick aroma of the rains.”

In speaking of southern citizenship, and the perils of its present environment, Grady says: “The resolute, clear-headed, broad-minded men of the South, the men whose genius made glorious every page of the first seventy years of American history—whose courage and fortitude you tested in five years of the fiercest war—whose energy has made bricks without straw, and spread splendor amidst the ashes of their war-wasted homes—these men wear this problem in their hearts and their brains, by day and by night. They realize, as you cannot, what this problem means, what they owe to this kindly and dependent race, the measure of their debt to the world in whose despite they defended and maintained slavery. And though their feet are hindered in its undergrowth, and their march encumbered with its burdens, they have lost neither the patience from which comes clearness, nor the faith from which comes courage. Nor, sir, when in passionate moments is disclosed to them that vague and awful shadow, with its lurid abysses and its crimson stains, into which I pray God they may never go, are they struck with more of apprehension than is needed to complete their consecration!”

The conclusion of that grand address, so powerful in scope and faultless in diction, is a forcible reminder of Webster’s great peroration in his reply to Hayne on Foot’s Resolution. Grady here says: “A mighty duty, sir, and a mighty inspiration impels every one of us to-night to lose in patriotic consecration whatever estranges, whatever divides. We, sir, are Americans, and we fight for human liberty. The uplifting force of the American idea is under every throne on earth. France, Brazil—these are our victories. To redeem the earth from kingcraft and oppression, this is our mission. And we shall not fail. God has sown in our soil the seed of his millennial harvest, and he will not lay the sickle to the ripening crop until his full and perfect day has come. Our history, sir, has been a constant and expanding miracle from Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, all the way, aye, even from the hour when, from the voiceless and trackless ocean, a new world rose to the sight of the inspired sailor. As we approach the fourth centennial of that stupendous day—when the old world will come to marvel and to learn, amid our gathered treasures—let us resolve to crown the miracles of our 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!”

The love and respect of the Mississippians and Louisianans, and of the entire Southwest for Prentiss was only equaled by the admiration of the North for Grady. All honor to their memories, and peace to their patriot shades! The “clods of the valley will be sweet unto them” until the resurrection morn.

COLUMBUS, GA., Feb. 5, 1890.

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SERMON BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE,

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THE great Academy of Music, Brooklyn, N.Y., was crowded to-day, February 23, as it never had been before. Prominent in the congregation were most of the gentlemen who had attended the banquet of the Southern Society. Their presence was due to the intimation that Dr. Talmage was going to preach on the life and character of the _Constitution’s_ late editor, Mr. Henry W. Grady. Dr. Talmage was at his best, in splendid voice, and his rounded periods made a deep impression upon all present. Taking for his text Isaiah viii., 1, “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen,” the preacher said:

To Isaiah, with royal blood in his veins and a habitant of palaces, does this divine order come. He is to take a roll, a large roll, and write on it with a pen, not an angel’s pen, but a man’s pen. So God honored the pen and so he honored the manuscript. In our day the mightiest roll is the religious and secular newspaper, and the mightiest pen is the editor’s pen, whether for good or evil. And God says now to every literary man, and especially to every journalist: “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen.”

THE NEWS ON THE MEDITERRANEAN.

Within a few weeks one of the strongest, most vivid and most brilliant of those pens was laid down on the editorial desk in Atlanta, never again to be resumed. I was far away at the time. We had been sailing up from the Mediterranean Sea, through the Dardanelles, which region is unlike anything I ever saw for beauty. There is not any other water scenery on earth where God has done so many picturesque things with islands. They are somewhat like the Thousand Islands of our American St. Lawrence, but more like heaven. Indeed, we had just passed Patmos, the place from which John had his apocalyptic vision. Constantinople had seemed to come out to greet us, for your approach to that city is different from any other city. Other cities as you approach them seem to retire, but this city, with its glittering minarets and pinnacles, seems almost to step into the water to greet you. But my landing there, that would have been to me an exhilaration, was suddenly stunned with the tidings of the death of my intimate friend, Henry W. Grady. I could hardly believe the tidings, for I had left on my study table at home letters and telegrams from him, those letters and telegrams having a warmth and geniality, and a wit such as he alone could express. The departure of no public man for many years has so affected me. For days I walked about as in a dream, and I resolved that, getting home, I would, for the sake of his bereaved household, and for the sake of his bereaved profession, and for the sake of what he had been to me, and shall continue to be as long as memory lasts, I would speak a word in appreciation of him, the most promising of Americans, and learn some of the salient lessons of his departure.

I have no doubt that he had enemies, for no man can live such an active life as he lived, or be so far in advance of his time without making enemies, some because he defeated their projects, and some because he outshone them. Owls and bats never did like the rising sun. But I shall tell you how he appeared to me, and I am glad that I told him while he was in full health what I thought of him. Memorial orations and gravestone epitaphs are often mean enough, for they say of a man after he is dead that which ought to have been said of him while living. One garland for a living brow is worth more than a mountain of japonicas and calla lilies heaped on a funeral casket. By a little black volume of fifty pages, containing the eulogiums and poems uttered and written at the demise of Clay and Webster and Calhoun and Lincoln and Sumner, the world tried to pay for the forty years of obloquy it heaped upon those living giants. If I say nothing in praise of a man while he lives I will keep silent when he is dead. Myrtle and weeping willow can never do what ought to have been done by amaranth and palm branch. No amount of “Dead March in Saul” rumbling from big organs at the obsequies can atone for non-appreciation of the man before he fell on sleep. The hearse cannot do what ought to have been done by chariot. But there are important things that need to be said about our friend, who was a prophet in American journalism, and who only a few years ago heard the command of my text: “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen.”

A RETROSPECT OF LIFE.

His father dead, Henry W. Grady, a boy fourteen years of age, took up the battle of life. It would require a long chapter to record the names of orphans who have come to the top. When God takes away the head of the household He very often gives to some lad in that household a special qualification. Christ remembers how that His own father died early, leaving Him to support Himself and His mother and His brothers in the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth, and He is in sympathy with all boys and all young men in the struggle. You say: “Oh, if my father had only lived I would have had a better education and I would have had a more promising start, and there are some wrinkles on my brow that would not have been there.” But I have noticed that God makes a special way for orphans. You would not have been half the man you are if you had not been obliged from your early days to fight your own battles. What other boys got out of Yale and Harvard you got in the university of hard knocks. Go among successful merchants, lawyers, physicians and men of all occupations and professions, and there are many of them who will tell you: “At ten, or twelve, or fifteen years of age, I started for myself; father was sick, or father was dead.” But somehow they got through and got up. I account for it by the fact that there is a special dispensation of God for orphans. All hail, the fatherless and motherless! The Lord Almighty will see you through. Early obstacles for Mr. Grady were only the means for development of his intellect and heart. And lo! when at thirty-nine years of age he put down his pen and closed his lips for the perpetual silence, he had done a work which many a man who lives on to sixty and seventy and eighty years never accomplishes. There is a great deal of senseless praise of longevity, as though it were a wonderful achievement to live a good while. Ah, my friends, it is not how long we live, but how well we live and how usefully we live. A man who lives to eighty years and accomplishes nothing for God or humanity might better have never lived at all. Methuselah lived nine hundred and sixty-nine years, and what did it amount to? In all those more than nine centuries he did not accomplish anything which seemed worth record. Paul lived only a little more than sixty, but how many Methuselahs would it take to make one Paul? Who would not rather have Paul’s sixty years than Methuselah’s nine hundred and sixty-nine? Robert McCheyne died at thirty years of age and John Summerfield at twenty-seven years of age, but neither earth nor heaven will ever hear the end of their usefulness. Longevity! Why, an elephant can beat you at that, for it lives a hundred and fifty and two hundred years. Gray hairs are the blossoms of the tree of life if found in the way of righteousness, but the frosts of the second death if found in the way of sin.

MR. GRADY AS A CHRISTIAN.

One of our able New York journals last spring printed a question and sent it to many people, and, among others, to myself: “Can the editor of a secular journal be a Christian?” Some of the newspapers answered no. I answered yes; and, lest you may not understand me, I say yes again. Summer before last, riding with Mr. Grady from a religious meeting in Georgia on Sunday night, he said to me some things which I now reveal for the first time, because it is appropriate now that I reveal them. He expressed his complete faith in the gospel, and expressed his astonishment and his grief that in our day so many young men were rejecting Christianity. From the earnestness and the tenderness and the confidence with which he spoke on these things I concluded that when Henry W. Grady made public profession of his faith in Christ, and took his place at the holy communion in the Methodist Church, he was honestly and truly Christian. That conversation that Sunday night, first in the carriage and then resumed in the hotel, impressed me in such a way that when I simply heard of his departure, without any of the particulars, I concluded that he was ready to go. I warrant there was no fright in the last exigency, but that he found what is commonly called “the last enemy” a good friend, and from his home on earth he went to a home in heaven. Yes, Mr. Grady not only demonstrated that an editor may be a Christian, but that a very great intellect may be gospelized. His mental capacity was so wonderful it was almost startling. I have been with him in active conversation while at the same time he was dictating to a stenographer editorials for the Atlanta _Constitution_. But that intellect was not ashamed to bow to Christ. Among his last dying utterances was a request for the prayers of the churches in his behalf.

There was that particular quality in him that you do not find in more than one person out of hundreds of thousands—namely, personal magnetism. People have tried to define that quality, and always failed, yet we have all felt its power. There are some persons who have only to enter a room or step upon a platform or into a pulpit, and you are thrilled by their presence, and when they speak your nature responds and you cannot help it. What is the peculiar influence with which such a magnetic person takes hold of social groups and audiences? Without attempting to define this, which is indefinable, I will say it seems to correspond to the waves of air set in motion by the voice or the movements of the body. Just like that atmospheric vibration is the moral or spiritual vibration which rolls out from the soul of what we call a magnetic person. As there may be a cord or rope binding bodies together, there may be an invisible cord binding souls. A magnetic man throws it over others as a hunter throws a lasso. Mr. Grady was surcharged with this influence, and it was employed for patriotism and Christianity and elevated purposes.

GREAT MEN MAY BE CHRISTIANS.

You may not know why, in the conversation which I had with Mr. Gladstone a few weeks ago, he uttered these memorable words about Christianity, some of which were cabled to America. He was speaking in reply to this remark: I said: “Mr. Gladstone, we are told in America by some people that Christianity does very well for weak-minded men and children in the infant class, but it is not fit for stronger minded men; but when we mention you, of such large intellectuality, as being a pronounced friend of religion, we silence their batteries.” Then Mr. Gladstone stopped on the hillside where we were exercising, and said: “The older I grow, the more confirmed I am in my faith in religion.” “Sir,” said he, with flashing eye and uplifted hand, “talk about the questions of the day, there is but one question, and that is the Gospel. That can and will correct everything. Do you have any of that dreadful agnosticism in America?” Having told him we had, he went on to say: “I am profoundly thankful that none of my children or kindred have been blasted by it. I am glad to say that about all the men at the top in Great Britain are Christians. Why, sir,” he said, “I have been in public position fifty-eight years, and forty-seven years in the cabinet of the British government, and during those forty-seven years I have been associated with sixty of the master minds of the century, and all but five of the sixty were Christians.” He then named the four leading physicians and surgeons of his country, calling them by name and remarking upon the high qualities of each of them and added: “They are all thoroughly Christian.” My friends, I think it will be quite respectable for a little longer to be the friends of religion. William E. Gladstone, a Christian; Henry W. Grady, a Christian. What the greatest of Englishmen said of England is true of America and of all Christendom. The men at the top are the friends of God and believers in the sanctities of religion, the most eminent of the doctors, the most eminent of the lawyers, the most eminent of the merchants, and there are no better men in all our land than some of those who sit in editorial chairs. And if that does not correspond with your acquaintanceship, I am sorry that you have fallen into bad company. In answer to the question put last spring, “Can a secular journalist be a Christian?” I not only answer in the affirmative, but I assert that so great are the responsibilities of that profession, so infinite and eternal the consequences of their obedience or disobedience of the words of my text, “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen,” and so many are the surrounding temptations, that the men of no other profession more deeply need the defenses and the reinforcements of the grace of God.

THE OPPORTUNITIES OF JOURNALISM.

And then look at the opportunities of journalism. I praise the pulpit and magnify my office, but I state a fact which you all know when I say that where the pulpit touches one person the press touches five hundred. The vast majority of people do not go to church, but all intelligent people read the newspapers. While, therefore, the responsibility of the minister is great, the responsibilities of editors and reporters is greater. Come, brother journalist, and get your ordination, not by the laying on of human hands, but by the laying on of the hands of the Almighty. To you is committed the precious reputation of men and the more precious reputation of women. Spread before our children an elevated literature. Make sin appear disgusting and virtue admirable. Believe good rather than evil. While you show up the hypocrisies of the church, show up the stupendous hypocrisies outside of the church. Be not, as some of you are, the mere echoes of public opinion; make public opinion. Let the great roll on which you write with a man’s pen be a message of light and liberty, and kindness and an awakening of moral power. But who is sufficient for these things! Not one of you without Divine help. But get that influence and the editors and reporters can go up and take this world for God and the truth. The mightiest opportunity in all the world for usefulness to-day is open before editors and reporters and publishers, whether of knowledge on foot, as in the book, or knowledge on the wing, as in the newspaper; I pray God, men of the newspaper press, whether you hear or read this sermon, that you may rise up to your full opportunity and that you may be divinely helped and rescued and blessed.

Some one might say to me: “How can you talk thus of the newspaper press when you yourself have sometimes been unfairly treated and misrepresented?” I answer that in the opportunity the newspaper press of this country and other countries have given me week by week to preach the gospel to the nations, I am put under so much obligation that I defy all editors and reporters, the world over, to write anything that shall call forth from me one word of bitter retort from now till the day of my death. My opinion is that all reformers and religious teachers, instead of spending so much time and energy in denouncing the press, had better spend more time in thanking them for what they have done for the world’s intelligence, and declaring their magnificent opportunity and urging their employment of it all for beneficent and righteous purposes.

A TYPE OF CHRISTIAN PATRIOTISM.

Again, I remark that Henry W. Grady stood for Christian patriotism irrespective of political spoils. He declined all official reward. He could have been Governor of Georgia, but refused it. He could have been Senator of the United States, but declined it. He remained plain Henry Grady. Nearly all the other orators of the political arena, as soon as the elections are over, go to Washington, or Albany, or Harrisburg, or Atlanta, to get in city or state or national office, reward for their services, and not getting what they want spend the rest of the time of that administration in pouting about the management of public affairs or cursing Harrison or Cleveland. When the great political campaigns were over Mr. Grady went home to his newspaper. He demonstrated that it is possible to toil for principles which he thought to be right, simply because they were right. Christian patriotism is too rare a commodity in this country. Surely the joy of living under such free institutions as those established here ought to be enough reward for political fidelity. Among all the great writers that stood at the last Presidential election on Democratic and Republican platforms, you cannot recall in your mind ten who were not themselves looking for remunerative appointments. Aye, you can count them all on the fingers of one hand. The most illustrious specimen of that style of man for the last ten years was Henry W. Grady.

Again, Mr. Grady stood for the New South, and was just what we want to meet three other men, one to speak for the New North, another for the New East, and another for the New West. The bravest speech made for the last quarter of a century was that made by Mr. Grady at the New England dinner in New York about two or three years ago. I sat with him that evening and know something of his anxieties, for he was to tread on dangerous ground, and might by one misspoken word have antagonized both sections. His speech was a victory that thrilled all of us who heard him and all who read him. That speech, great for wisdom, great for kindness, great for pacification, great for bravery, will go down to the generations with Webster’s speech at Bunker Hill, William Wirt’s speech at the arraignment of Aaron Burr, Edmund Burke’s speech on Warren Hastings, Robert Emmett’s speech for his own vindication.

Who will in conspicuous action represent the New North as he did the New South? Who will come forth for the New East and who for the New West? Let old political issues be buried, let old grudges die. Let new theories be launched. With the coming in of a new nation at the gates of Castle Garden every year, and the wheat bin and corn crib of our land enlarged with every harvest, and a vast multitude of our population still plunged in illiteracy to be educated, and moral questions abroad involving the very existence of our Republic, let the old political platforms that are worm-eaten be dropped, and platforms that shall be made of two planks, the one the Ten Commandments, and the other the Sermon on the Mount, lifted for all of us to stand on. But there is a lot of old politicians grumbling all around the sky who don’t want a New South, a New North, a New East, or a New West. They have some old war speeches that they prepared in 1861, that in all our autumnal elections they feel called upon to inflict upon the country. They growl louder and louder in proportion as they are pushed back further and further and the Henry W. Gradys come to the front. But the mandate, I think, has gone forth from the throne of God that a new American Nation shall take the place of the old, and the new has been baptized for God and liberty, and justice and peace and morality and religion.

THE APOTHEOSIS.

And now our much lamented friend has gone to give account. Suddenly the facile and potent pen is laid down and the eloquent tongue is silent. What? Is there no safeguard against fatal disease? The impersonation of stout health was Mr. Grady. What compactness of muscle! What ruddy complexion! What flashing eye! Standing with him in a group of twenty or thirty persons at Piedmont, he looked the healthiest, as his spirits were the blithest. Shall we never feel again the hearty grasp of his hand or be magnetized with his eloquence? Men of the great roll, men of the pen, men of wit, men of power, if our friend had to go when the call came, so must you when your call comes. When God asks you what have you done with your pen, or your eloquence, or your wealth, or your social position, will you be able to give satisfactory answer? What have we been writing all these years? If mirth, has it been innocent mirth, or that which tears and stings and lacerates? From our pen have there come forth productions healthy or poisonous! In the last great day, when the warrior must give account of what he has done with his sword, and the merchant what he has done with his yard stick, and the mason what he has done with his trowel, and the artist what he has done with his pencil, we shall have to give account of what we have done with our pen. There are gold pens and diamond pens, and pens of exquisite manufacture, and every few weeks I see some new kind of pen, each said to be better than the other; but in the great day of our arraignment before the Judge of the quick and dead, that will be the most beautiful pen, whether gold or steel or quill, which never wrote a profane or unclean or cruel word, or which from the day it was carved or split at the nib, dropped from its point kindness and encouragement, and help and gratitude to God and benediction for man.