What was he to the Nation? Compelled by the limitations of the hour to answer in one word, I choose this: He it was who first taught the rising generation of the South to bind the name of Lincoln with that of Washington “as a sign upon their hand and a frontlet on their brow.”
We stand face to face with a great mystery. It is the tragedy of early death, like that of Arthur Henry Hallam, which wrung from the sweetest singer of our time the noblest poem of sorrow, a poem whose pages have been for three days past luminous to me with new and richer meaning. Accepting the evidence of consciousness in its report of the hopes and aspirations of the human soul, there can be but two rational hypotheses for this mystery of an unfinished life. One has been phrased by Renan in words like this: “There is at the heart of the universe, an infinite fiend who has filled the hearts of his creatures with delusions, in order that in awful mockery he may witness the discomfiture of their despair.” The other theory has been phrased by Martineau in words like these: “The universe, which includes and folds us round, is the life-dwelling of an eternal mind and an infinite love; and every aspiration is but a prophecy of the reality in that overarching scene where one incompleteness is rounded out in the greatness of God.” I need not tell you which of these faiths Henry Grady accepted, or I accept. I envy not the man who can think that there are in this universe any shadows dark enough to quench his sunny spirit. I believe (turning to his picture, on the stage) oh friend of mine! that I shall look again into that love-lit eye—that I shall clasp once more thy generous hand!
A poet sings of the echoes of the bugle from cliff and scar as contrasted with the impact of human influence:
Oh, love, they die on your rich sky,
They faint on hill and field and river;
Our echoes roll from soul to soul
And grow forever and forever!
In all gratitude we can say that we are happier because he lived; in all humility that we are better because his life touched ours. And because this is true our children and our fellow men shall be made happier and better; and so the echoes of his soul, reduplicated in ten thousand hearts, shall abide, a gladdening and beneficent force—
Until the stars grow old,
And the suns grow cold,