Yesterday we stood by his tomb. No private citizen in this country ever had such a pageant. For miles the streets were lined with people. We saw the aged and the young, the rich and the poor, the white and the black, with eyes dimmed by tears, with hearts bowed down with sorrow at loss of him. They had left their homes upon our greatest festal day to pay him the homage of their tears. To each of them his loss was a personal sorrow.
I knew Henry W. Grady well, and I loved him. To me his death is a personal grief. He had been my friend for more than twenty-three years. Well do I remember the day I joined his class in our University. Well do I picture his friendly presence as he bade me welcome and invited me to his home. Well do I recall our meeting in our college societies. Our plans, our struggles, our defeats and our triumphs there. Since that time, I have sat with him around social boards. He has been time and again an honored and a welcomed guest in my house. I shall miss him there. We have been together in public enterprises, we have met in the busy marts of men. We have worked side by side, and we have differed upon questions of policy, but in all these differences he has been my friend. I loved him, and deplore his death.
We shall erect in this city a monument to commemorate his many virtues, and to hold him up as an example before the young and those who come after us; but however exalted that monument may be, and however near the skys it may reach, the greatest and best monument to us who knew him will be the memory of his many virtues which we shall always treasure in our hearts.
Sink, thou of nobler light.
The land will mourn thee in its darkening hour;
Its heavens grow gray at thy retiring power;
Thou stirring orb of mind, thou beacon power,
Be thy great memory still a guardian might,
When thou art gone from sight.
Judge Emory Speer was on the list of speakers to follow Mr. Brown, but did not reach the city in time to take part in the exercises.