Let us gather up the sunbeams
Lying all around our path,
Let us keep the wheat and roses,
Casting out the thorns and chaff.
The sweet, pacific tone of his mind gave him a wonderful influence over the masses. More than once when disturbing questions were agitating the city, and party and personal feeling ran high, has he by his conciliatory spirit and harmless pleasantry quelled the boisterous multitude. This spirit was ever fruitful of methods and concessions by which all could harmonize. It was the cropping out of these broad, liberal views in the fields of national patriotism that arrested the attention of other sections of the Union, and gave rise to calls for Grady to address the people at the meeting of the Historical Society in New York over two years ago. The eloquent utterances of the young orator, as he painted the Confederate soldier returning from the war, ragged, shoeless and penniless, fired the Northern heart with a sympathy for the South it had never known before.
From this time his fame as an orator was established, and he was at once ranked among the greatest living orators of the day.
Thoughtful men of the North, recognizing the race problem as one of the coming momentous issues of the future, were eager to hear the broad views and patriotic suggestions of this great pacificator. An invitation was there extended by the Merchants’ Association of Boston to address them at Faneuil Hall. The address seemed to call forth all his capacious powers, and is styled the crowning masterpiece of his life. As he graphically sketched the happy results of the sun shining upon a land with all differences harmonized, with all aspirations purified by the limpid fount of patriotism, he sketched a panorama of loveliness and beauty and promise that enraptured his hearers. And as the notes of the dying swan thrill with new melody, so the last utterances of the dying statesman will have now a new charm for those who loved him.