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.