The love and respect of the Mississippians and Louisianans, and of the entire Southwest for Prentiss was only equaled by the admiration of the North for Grady. All honor to their memories, and peace to their patriot shades! The “clods of the valley will be sweet unto them” until the resurrection morn.
Columbus, Ga., Feb. 5, 1890.
SERMON BY T. DE WITT TALMAGE,
THE great Academy of Music, Brooklyn, N.Y., was crowded to-day, February 23, as it never had been before. Prominent in the congregation were most of the gentlemen who had attended the banquet of the Southern Society. Their presence was due to the intimation that Dr. Talmage was going to preach on the life and character of the Constitution’s late editor, Mr. Henry W. Grady. Dr. Talmage was at his best, in splendid voice, and his rounded periods made a deep impression upon all present. Taking for his text Isaiah viii., 1, “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen,” the preacher said:
To Isaiah, with royal blood in his veins and a habitant of palaces, does this divine order come. He is to take a roll, a large roll, and write on it with a pen, not an angel’s pen, but a man’s pen. So God honored the pen and so he honored the manuscript. In our day the mightiest roll is the religious and secular newspaper, and the mightiest pen is the editor’s pen, whether for good or evil. And God says now to every literary man, and especially to every journalist: “Take thee a great roll and write in it with a man’s pen.”
THE NEWS ON THE MEDITERRANEAN.
Within a few weeks one of the strongest, most vivid and most brilliant of those pens was laid down on the editorial desk in Atlanta, never again to be resumed. I was far away at the time. We had been sailing up from the Mediterranean Sea, through the Dardanelles, which region is unlike anything I ever saw for beauty. There is not any other water scenery on earth where God has done so many picturesque things with islands. They are somewhat like the Thousand Islands of our American St. Lawrence, but more like heaven. Indeed, we had just passed Patmos, the place from which John had his apocalyptic vision. Constantinople had seemed to come out to greet us, for your approach to that city is different from any other city. Other cities as you approach them seem to retire, but this city, with its glittering minarets and pinnacles, seems almost to step into the water to greet you. But my landing there, that would have been to me an exhilaration, was suddenly stunned with the tidings of the death of my intimate friend, Henry W. Grady. I could hardly believe the tidings, for I had left on my study table at home letters and telegrams from him, those letters and telegrams having a warmth and geniality, and a wit such as he alone could express. The departure of no public man for many years has so affected me. For days I walked about as in a dream, and I resolved that, getting home, I would, for the sake of his bereaved household, and for the sake of his bereaved profession, and for the sake of what he had been to me, and shall continue to be as long as memory lasts, I would speak a word in appreciation of him, the most promising of Americans, and learn some of the salient lessons of his departure.
I have no doubt that he had enemies, for no man can live such an active life as he lived, or be so far in advance of his time without making enemies, some because he defeated their projects, and some because he outshone them. Owls and bats never did like the rising sun. But I shall tell you how he appeared to me, and I am glad that I told him while he was in full health what I thought of him. Memorial orations and gravestone epitaphs are often mean enough, for they say of a man after he is dead that which ought to have been said of him while living. One garland for a living brow is worth more than a mountain of japonicas and calla lilies heaped on a funeral casket. By a little black volume of fifty pages, containing the eulogiums and poems uttered and written at the demise of Clay and Webster and Calhoun and Lincoln and Sumner, the world tried to pay for the forty years of obloquy it heaped upon those living giants. If I say nothing in praise of a man while he lives I will keep silent when he is dead. Myrtle and weeping willow can never do what ought to have been done by amaranth and palm branch. No amount of “Dead March in Saul” rumbling from big organs at the obsequies can atone for non-appreciation of the man before he fell on sleep. The hearse cannot do what ought to have been done by chariot. But there are important things that need to be said about our friend, who was a prophet in American journalism, and who only a few years ago heard the command of my text: “Take thee a great roll, and write in it with a man’s pen.”