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: