A SAD LOSS.
From the “Buffalo, N.Y., Express.”
The death of no other man than Henry Woodfin Grady could have plunged Georgia into such deep mourning as darkens all her borders to-day. Atlanta is the center of Georgia life, and Grady was the incarnation of Atlanta vitality. His was a personality difficult to associate with the idea of death. He was so thoroughly alive, bodily and mentally, he was so young, the fibers of his being reached out and were embedded in so many of the living interests of Georgia and the whole South, that no thought of his possible sudden end would rise in the minds of any who knew him. And his friends were legion. Everybody called him Henry.
In ten years he rose from obscurity to a prominence that made him the foremost figure of his day in the South, and had already linked his name with the second office in the gift of the American people. As an orator he was the pride of the South, as Chauncey M. Depew is of the North. As a journalist no Northern man bears the relation to his section that Grady did to the South. As a public-spirited citizen it seemed only necessary for Grady to espouse a project for it to succeed beyond all expectations. Yet but a few years ago he started three newspapers in succession and they all failed! Failure was the alphabet of his success.
When Mr. Grady bought a quarter interest in the Atlanta Constitution he had had but slender training in journalism. He had written a great deal, which is quite another thing. Though the Constitution has remained intensely provincial in its methods ever since, he has given it an influence in the South unrivalled by any other paper, with possibly one exception. Under his inspiration the Constitution viewed everything Georgian, and especially Atlantian, as better than similar things elsewhere. It backed up local enterprises with a warmth that shames the public spirit of most Northern cities. It boasted of local achievements with a vehemence that was admirable while it sometimes was amusing. Florid in his own speech and writing, Mr. Grady gathered about him on the Constitution men of similar gifts, who often wrote with pens dipped, as it were, in parti-colored inks, and filled its columns with ornate verbal illuminations. Yet amid much that was over-done and under-done there often appeared work of genuine merit. For the Constitution under Grady has been the vehicle by which some of the most talented of the late Southern writers have become familiar to the public. Grady was proud of them, and of his paper. “I have the brightest staff and the best newspaper in the United States,” he once remarked to this writer. And Mr. Grady firmly believed what he said.
It was as a speech-maker that Grady was best known at the North. Echoes of his eloquence had been heard here from time to time, but soon after the Charleston earthquake he made the address on “The New South,” before the New England Society at New York, that won for him the applause of the entire country, and must now stand as the greatest effort of his life. His recent speech in Boston is too fresh in mind to need attention here. Mr. Grady’s style was too florid to be wholly pleasing to admirers of strong and simple English. He dealt liberally in tropes and figures. He was by turns fervid and pathetic. He made his speeches, as he conducted his newspaper, in a manner quite his own. It pleased the people in Georgia, and even when he and his partner, Capt. Howell, ran the Constitution on both sides of the Prohibition question it was regarded as a brilliant stroke of journalistic genius.
Personally Mr. Grady was one of the most companionable and lovable of men. His hand and his purse were always open. His last act in Atlanta, when waiting at the depot for the train that bore him to the Boston banquet, was to head a subscription to send the Gate City Guard to attend Jefferson Davis’s funeral. His swarthy face was lighted by a bright, moist, black eye that flashed forth the keen, active spirit within. The impression left upon the mind after meeting him was of his remarkable alertness.
He will be a sad loss to Georgia, and to the South. There is none to take his place. His qualities and his usefulness must be divided henceforth among a number. No one man possesses them all.