The gold leaf. [volume] (Henderson, N.C.) 1881-1911, 1894-06-28
THOMAS W. MASON.
GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF HIS
SPLENDID GRAFTON

Delivered at the Laying Of the
Cornerstone Of the Confederate
Monument---Mr. John r. Morris
Writes About the Man and His
Manner and Methods--The Tri-
butte One Genius Pays Another.
[John R. Morris. in Charlotte Observer.
The people are curious to know
more of the man Familiarity called
Tom Mason.
In all that makes citizenship and
renders to man a home about which
his affections twine, Thomas Mason is
a North Carolinian. He was born in
Brunswick county, Va, hard against
the North Carolina line; the upper
line of the latter State, so far as par
allel, being the southern bound of the
estate of Nathaniel Mason, the father
of Tom. The residential mansion,
through whose windows dawned his
natal day, stood in prospective out
against the sky of the State from
whence came his mother, the daughter
of Joseph Arlington, of Nash county,
and which was the State to which he
passed to find literary mother-the
University of North Carolina. He
also wooed and welded daughter of
the Old North State. Since mother,
wife, children and grandchildren are
North Carolinians, the incident of his
adoption has become a law Of nature
deeply, lovingly, and ineradicably.
And when l am reminded that the
altar where he worships, as are his
dearest kindred, is in North Carolina,
l think of the message sent to England
by old John Winthrop, the sturdy
Pilgrim Father: "I call that country
my home where l may most glorify
God and be with my dearest friends I"
Mason has rather sluggish eyes.
They never brighten while he speaks.
Sometimes the long lids almost close
and then the expression, the absence
of expression, is not unlike the
physical phases of blindness. But
everywhere on his face there is a
dance of animation, which, with
graceful speech and the sweep of the
tall frame-a bit stopped in the
shoulders-convey to the listener a
sense of correspondence between easy
undulations of body and the supple
ness of his sentences. A stranger to
the arti6ce of the actor, he had, never
theless, peeped at Hamlet's advice to
the player not to "o'er step the
modesty of nature" His singular
energy is hedged by the eloquence OF
naturalness.
Those who heard Mr.. Mason on the
laying of the corner stone of the
monument to the Confederate dead,
in Raleigh, on the 22nd of May, will
never forget his powerful, and ap-
parently instructive, gestural emphasis
at the mention of Stonewall Jackson
in the trope in which Jackson and the
eagle are made interchangeable
figures, Lifting both hands above his
head, with palms spread, with fingers
apart and crooked as the talons of a
fowl of prey, he spoke of the troops
around Richmond in June, '62 as
{" x waiting for Jackson, the
eagle of the army, to swoop down
from the mountains.
Until Mason had uttered the word
'army' his hands remained poised
then, thrusting them outward and
downward, he described the circling
and descending of the king fowl of the
crags. The effect of the utterance and
emphasis Of movement was to work
first spell of profound muteness, ther
from the vast audience, a tumultuou:
response to the sentiment.
When I, then little boy, first read
the well-known six lines from Tennysor
on the Eagle-a poem which a grea
scholar told me would have made
Tennyson immortal had he writer
nothing more-I experienced the same
brain tingle which ! felt when Mason
by speech and gesture wrought out the
simile SO perfectly. Though familiar
to SO many readers of polite literature
l quote the few lines so big with poetry
In the final couplet there is a kinshiI
creditable to Mason between his prose
rhythm and Tennyson's rhythmic
verse on the eagle:
3" He clasps the crag with hooked hands
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world he stands.
The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls"
Mr.. Mason's reference to NORTH
Carolina as the good natured Dutch
man was drawn from Washington
Irving's Rip Van Winkle. l admi
that the application. as was the pur
posed implication, was fine tribute
to North Carolina. 1t was dainty, bu
it was enough, if not too much. L
was the one quaint and unexpected
mosaic wrought in the pure white O
the pavement over which swept thu
splendid retinue of thought ane
metaphor. 1t was not a sharp dis
sonance, but an undertone. Happily
it was the only point at which th'
painstaking work was in peril o