A GREAT SOUL.
From the “Baxley Banner.”
A great soul has passed away.
After a life brief but brilliant, he is lost to the country that loved and honored him, and which his lofty eloquence and pure patriotism have illustrated and adorned.
As the lightning that comes out of the South, and flashes from horizon to horizon, so was his short life in its bright, swift passage, illuminating the earth.
In the death of Henry Grady, his city, his State, the South, the whole country has suffered a great loss. His voice was ever the ringing, stirring herald-tones that announced the promise of fairer days and a happier people. He was no low-browed, latter-day prophet of evil; but preached here and everywhere the new and bright evangel of hope. He was the voice of his city, heard ringing through Georgia and the Union; the voice of his State, heard clarion-like from ocean to ocean, and the golden-mouthed messenger from the South to the North, proclaiming a brotherhood of love that the shock of war had not destroyed. And thus his death will be mourned, not in Atlanta or in Georgia only, but wherever an American heart is, that heart will mourn his death.
Particularly is Mr. Grady’s death a loss to journalism. He stood the peer of any in the world, and was the greatest journalist in the South. His pen was as eloquent as his tongue, and from the closet as well as from the platform his words came with vivifying power, refreshing and inspiring.
Death struck him down from the lofty pinnacle of fame, to which his eloquence had so swiftly upborne him. A young man, he had already reached a height that would have dazzled a weaker soul, and he has fallen in the midst of his triumph, while yet the plaudits of tens of thousands from every part of this country rang fainter and fainter on his dying ear. It was something worth to have such heartfelt approbations sounding around him as he sunk to his last sleep. It was the crowning of a life well lived, and spent with lavish patriotism for his country’s weal.
He burned his life to the socket like a swift devouring flame. His energy was tremendous, and almost feverish in its eagerness to do something worth the doing. He returned to his city and his home with death upon him, stricken even in his great triumph. The glow of fever followed hard upon the glow of victory, and so, after a brief and burning life—a life crowded thick with triumphs, “God’s finger touched him and he slept”—the sleep He giveth to His beloved.