Receive proud recompense. We give in charge
Their names to the sweet lyre. The historic muse,
Proud of the treasure, marches with it down
To latest times; and sculpture, in her turn,
Gives bond in stone and ever-during brass
To guard them and immortalize her trust.
In obedience to this vitalizing and commanding influence of a noble people, in deference to the designation of his brothers and mine, in the beautiful association and sacred memories of alma mater, I come to place a simple chaplet upon the grave of Henry Grady, an humble votive offering at the shrine he has merited and won in the Valhalla of the American people. Perhaps, sir, in all this vast congregation there is not one man who knew as I knew our dead brother in the happy and halcyon days of our childhood. Thirty years ago we were boys together. Together we attended the little school in the shadow of the great university buildings, taught by a noble woman, the daughter of the venerable Dr. Church, the president of Franklin College. Henry was then remarkable for his sunny nature, his generous disposition, his superabundant flow of good-humor and spirited energy. Beautifully proportioned, agile, swift of foot, sinewy and strong for his age, he was easily the leader of our childish sports. Among his young companions he was even then the popular favorite he has ever been. In the revolution of the “Great Iron Wheel,” (an allusion which all good Methodists will understand), I was borne away at the end of the year, and Henry Grady for years went out of my life. A year later the dun clouds of war enveloped the country. Five years elapsed, and when I returned to Athens in September, 1866, to enter the sophomore class at the University, there was Grady rising junior. The beautiful boy had become a beautiful youth. His sunny nature had become even brighter. His generosity had become a fault. When I had known him in ’59, his father was perhaps the most successful and enterprising merchant of Northeast Georgia. He was a sturdy North Carolinian with that robustness and shrewd vigor of intellectuality which, with men from that section, has seemed, in many instances, to dispense with the necessity of elaborate culture. A soldier and officer of the confederacy, he had fallen at the head of his regiment, in one of the desperate battles on the lines at Petersburg, when the immortal army of Northern Virginia had, in the language of the gallant Gordon, been “fought to a frazzle.” The brave soldier and thrifty merchant had left a large estate. Grady was living with his mother, in that lovely, old-fashioned home of which, in Boston, he caught the vision, “with its lofty pillars, and white pigeons fluttering down through the golden air.”
His college life was a miracle of sweetness and goodness; never did a glass of wine moisten his lips. Never did an oath or an obscene word defile that tongue whose honeyed accents in time to come were to persuade the millions of the fidelity and patriotism of the people he loved. Well do I remember the look of amazement, of indulgent but all intrepid forbearance, which came into his face when one day a college bully offered to insult him. In those days of innumerable college flirtations he had but one sweetheart, and she the beautiful girl who became his wife and is now the mother of his children, and his bereaved and disconsolate widow.
This sweetness of disposition ran through his whole life. If the great journal of which he became an editor was engaged in an acrimonious controversy, some other writer was detailed to conduct it. Grady had no taste for controversy of any acrid sort, and I recall but perhaps one exception in his whole editorial life. But while he would never quarrel, I had the best right to know, when the emergency came, he had the intrepidity of a hero. Well do I remember the outcome of a thoughtlessly cruel practical joke, which resulted in showing me and many others the splendid fire of his courage. Early in my college life, as Grady and I were walking in a dark night on the lonely streets of Cobham to a supposed meeting of the Chi Phi Fraternity we were waylaid by a number of our college-mates. I was in the secret, Grady was not. A huge navy revolver, with every cylinder loaded with blank cartridges, had been thrust upon him as a means of defense from a band of mythical outlaws, who had made purely imaginary threats of the bloodiest description against everybody in general and the students of the university in particular. Grady put the revolver in his pocket and promised to stand by me, and well did he redeem the promise. We started and as we passed a dark grove near the residence of General Howell Cobb the band of supposed assassins rushed upon us with demoniac yells, and firing a veritable mitraille of pistol shots with powder charges. Thoughtless boy that I was. I shouted a defiance to the assassins and called to Grady to stand by me, and I gave shot for shot as fast as I could pull the trigger. The dear fellow had not the slightest doubt that we were assailed by overwhelming odds by armed desperate foes, but he stood by my side, firing straight at the on-rushing foe, until, and not until, after several volleys I was shot dead and dropped to the ground; when, being overpowered by numbers, and his ally killed, he made a masterly retreat. Dear, kindly, gallant nature, little didst thou deem that this boyish prank, practiced by those whose familiar love embolden them, and all in the riotous exuberance of careless youth would so soon be recalled when thou wert gone, recalled with sighs and tears to testify that thy gentle life had under its kindly surface a soul as fearless as ever “swarmed up the breach at Ascalon.”
Grady, as a writer and orator, was surpassed by no student of the University, although he was doubtless the youngest member of his class. Always, however, more successful in his efforts to advance the political fortunes of others than of himself, he was defeated for anniversarian of the Phi Kappa society by one vote; but, as I remember, he bore off the equal distinction of commencement orator, each society, at that time, having the right to elect one of its members to that position. He did not graduate with class honor, and perhaps fortunately. It is too often true that honor men mistake the text-books which are merely the keys to the understanding, for objects worthy of ultimate pursuit and mastery, and we sometimes find these gentlemen grubbing for Greek roots and construing abstruse problems, while the great, busy, throbbing world is passing them by, and has forgotten their existence. From the University of Georgia, Grady went to the University of Virginia. Great tidings of his success came back to us; we did not doubt that in any contest which would try the temper of the man he would roll the proud scions of the first families of Virginia in the humiliating dust of defeat. Sore indeed were the lamentations, vociferous our denials of a free ballot and a fair count, when we learned that he had been defeated in the society contest there; again, as I remember, by one vote. He came back to Georgia and to journalism, and from that moment his history is common property. Others have spoken, or will speak, of his accomplishments in turning the Pactolian streams of capital into the channels of Southern investment, of the numberless enterprises to which he brought his lucidity of statement, his captivating powers of argumentation, his magnetic methods for the inspiration of others. The monuments of the vast and far-reaching designs stand out all over this broad land; gigantic factories, their tall chimneys towering toward the sky, mighty railroads stretching through the mountains of Georgia, where Tallulah and Tugalo rush downward toward the sea, where hard by Toccoa dashes its translucent waves to spray. Others, far away toward the shore of the Mexican Gulf, whose languid waves, impelled by the soft winds of the tropics, cast the sea foam on the snowy blossoms of the magnolia and the golden fruitage of the orange, mines have been opened and earth made to surrender from subterranean stores her hidden wealth at the touch of his magical wand. Unnumbered beneficent projects attest his genius and his philanthropy. But, not content to evolve the treasures of physical nature, he labored incessantly to provide methods to develop the mentality of the youth of the State. As a trustee of the University, and an active member of its Alumni society; as one in control of that mighty engine of public thought, the great paper of which he was an editor, his influence was looking and moving ever toward the light. He knew that popular ignorance was the greatest danger to liberty, the greatest foe to national prosperity. He knew that if the terrible potency of its groping in darkness and prejudice could but once, like the blind Samson, grasp the pillar of society in its muscular arms, it would put forth its baleful strength and whelm every social interest in crushing, appalling disaster and irremediable ruin.