PERSONAL TRIBUTES.
THOUGHTS ON H. W. GRADY.
By B. H. Samett.
MEN of genius often die early. Keats died at twenty-six, Shelly at thirty, Byron at thirty-six, and Burns at thirty-seven. Henry Grady was born May 24th, 1850, and hence was a little more than thirty-nine years of age at his death.
In the opinion of many, no more brilliant man has lived since Byron died. In the power of intense, beautiful and striking expression he has had no equal among us. Had he turned his attention to poetry he would have written something as beautiful as Childe Harold.
Take, for instance, a sentence or two, written eight or ten years ago, in an article from New York to the Constitution, entitled “The Atheistic Tide.” The whole article is exceptionally brilliant. I select at random a paragraph or two:
“We have stripped all the earth of mystery and brought all its phenomena under the square and compass, so that we might have expected science to doubt the mystery of life itself, and to plant its theodolite for a measurement of the Eternal, and pitch its crucible for an analysis of the Soul. It was natural that the Greek should be led to the worship of his physical Gods, for the earth itself was a mystery that he could not divine, a vastness and a vagueness that he could not comprehend. But we have fathomed its uttermost secret—felt its most hidden pulse, girdled it with steel, harnessed and trapped it to our liking. What was mystery is now demonstration—what was vague is now apparent. Science has dispelled illusion after illusion, struck down error after error, made plain all that was vague on earth and reduced every mystery to demonstration. It is little wonder then that, at last, having reduced all the illusions of matter to an equation, and anchored every theory to a fixed formula, it should assail the mystery of life itself and warn the world that science would yet furnish the key to the problem of the soul. The obelisk, plucked from the heart of Egypt, rests upon a shore that was as vaguely and infinitely beyond the knowledge or aspiration of its builders, as the shores of a star that lights the spaces beyond our vision are to us to-day. The Chinaman jostles us in the streets, and the centuries that look through his dreamy eyes have lost all sense of wonder—ships that were freighted in the heart of Africa lie in our harbors, and our market-places are vocal with more tongues than bewildered the builders of Babel—a letter slips round the earth in ninety days and the messages of men flash along the bed of the ocean—we tell the secrets of the universe as a woman tells her beads, and the stars whirl serenely through orbits that science has defined—we even read of the instant when the comet that plunged in dim illimitable distance, where even the separate stars are lost in mist and vapor, shall whirl again into the vision of man, a wanderer that could not shake off the inexorable supervision of science, even in the chill and measureless depths of the universe.”