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!