HENRY GRADY’S DEATH.
From the “Charleston Evening Sun.”
Henry Grady is dead.
With what an electric shock of pain and grief will this simple announcement thrill the entire country. His death, following close upon the death of the chieftain of the Old South—full of age and honors, and followed to the grave by the reverential and chastened grief of a whole people—is in striking contrast and more poignant in its nature, since the young Hercules thus prematurely cut down had just sprung to the front as leader and chieftain of the New South, and was largely the embodiment of her renaissance, her rejuvenescent life and hopes and aspirations, as the other was of her dead and sacred past.
In the prime of life and the flower of robust manhood, having just signalized himself by a triumph in which all his powers of culture, talent, and patriotism were taxed to the highest and nobly responded to the demand made them, and having placed himself in the foremost ranks of the world’s great men as a splendid type of the South’s peculiar qualities, as a worthy heir of the virtues of the Old South, and as the strongest champion of the hopes of the New, his death at this time is to her a distinct calamity. And yet for his own individual fame’s sake it is to be doubted whether Mr. Grady, lived he “a thousand years, would find” himself “so apt to die,” as now in the zenith of his fame, with his “blushing honors thick upon him.”
With Burke he could say, “I can shut the book. I might wish to read a page or two more. But this is enough for my measure.”
Mr. Grady had gained the attention of the Northern ear and the confidence of the Northern people as no other Southerner could boast of having done. When those “grave and reverend seigniors” of the stern, inflexible, unemotional Puritan race, who not a fortnight since, in Boston’s banquet hall, wept manly unused tears at the magic eloquence and pathos of the young Southerner’s words, and fell to love him for the uncompromising truth, the manliness, the directness and the candor of them, and for the personal grace and fascination and humanitarian kindliness of the speaker—when they learn that this being, so lately among them, the chief object of their care and attention, and so sentient-seeming and bounding with life and the God-given inspiration of more than mortal vigor called genius—that this being, so gifted, so sanguine, lies cold and breathless in the chill arms of death, shall they not, and through them the great people of whom they are the proudest representatives, mingle their tears with ours over the mortal remains of this new dead son of the South, in whose heart was no rankling of the old deathly fratricidal bitterness, but whose voice was ever raised for the re-cementing of the fraternal ties so rudely broken by the late huge world-shaking internecine strife?
And shall not his great appeal—yet echoing over the country—for justice, moderation, forbearance, appreciation for the South and the social evil under which she is providentially unequally laboring to her destiny, be inerasibly impressed upon the country, coming as it does from the lips of a dying man?
In the death of Jefferson Davis the last barrier to a complete reunion of the sections was removed. In the death of Henry Grady the North and the South will be brought together to mourn a mutual bereavement. If it shall be the cause of completing the reunion of the sections, his sad and untimely death will not have been in vain.