It is seldom that a people are called upon in so short a space of time to mourn the loss of two such men as Jefferson Davis and Henry W. Grady. The first was a blow for which we were prepared, for like ripened grain, Mr. Davis fell, full of years and honor, before the scythe of the reaper; but the death of Mr. Grady comes to us as a sorrow with all the force of a painful surprise. He was cut down in the bloom of a robust physical manhood, in the full enjoyment of his magnificent mental powers by which he had just ascended to the very pinnacle of fame. The eyes of the country were fixed upon him, the son of the South, whose transcendent genius inspired the hope of the blessed realization of promises with which his brief but brilliant career was so full. But in the death of this illustrious journalist and matchless orator the lesson is enforced that “The path of glory leads but to the grave.”
Mr. Grady grew up in the refined atmosphere of cultured Athens, and his mental nature treasured the classic light of that seat of learning, and it glowed with attractive radiance in all of his editorial work. In his death the press of the country loses its brightest ornament, and the South loses a champion without compare, whose pen was a trenchant blade in fighting her battles, and a shield when used to defend her from the hurtling arrows of envy and malice. His luminous pen made the path of the South’s progress glow, as with unflagging zeal he devoted his best endeavors to the amelioration of her war-ruined condition.
Mr. Grady, as the representative of what people are pleased to call the “New South,” but which is the “Old South” rehabilitated, was, in the providence of God, calculated to do for his country what Hill, Gordon and other brilliant lights of the old régime could never have compassed. As David, “the man of war,” was not permitted to build the temple, but that glory was reserved for Solomon, so Grady, the exponent of present principles, was permitted to gather the fragments and broken columns of the South’s ruined fortunes and begin the erection of a temple of prosperity so grand in proportion, so symmetrical in outline, as to attract, in its incomplete state, the admiration of the world.
In the extremity of our grief we are apt to magnify our loss, but this, indeed, seems irreparable, and we can take no comfort in the assurance of the philosopher who codified the experience of the past into the assurance that great ability is always found equal to the demand. On whom will Grady’s mantle fall? There really seems to be none worthy to wear what he so easily graced. And every Southern heart weighed down with a sense of its woe cannot but ask,
O death, why arm with cruelty thy power
To spare the idle weed yet lop the flower?
STILLED IS THE ELOQUENT TONGUE.
From the “Brunswick Times.”