Part 9 (1/2)

The fact is, General, it would give me great pleasure to bury the whole lot of you.”

Butler lay back in his arm-chair and roared with laughter. ”You've got ahead of me, Father,” he said. ”You may go. Good morning, Father.”

One of the incidents of which Father Ryan told me occurred when smallpox was raging in a State prison. The official chaplain had fled and no one could be found to take his place. One day a prisoner asked for a minister to pray for him, and Father Ryan, whose parish was not far away, was sent for. He was in the prison before the messenger had returned and, having been exposed to contagion, was not permitted to leave. He remained in the prison ministering to the sick until the epidemic had pa.s.sed.

Immediately after the war he was stationed in New Orleans where he edited _The Star_, a Roman Catholic weekly. Afterward he was in Nashville, Clarksville, and Knoxville, and from there went to Augusta, Georgia, where he founded and edited the ”_Banner of the South_,”

which was permanently furled after having waved for a few years.

Unlike most Southern poets, Father Ryan did not take his themes from Nature, and when her phenomena enters into his verse it is usually as a setting for the expression of some ethic or emotional sentiment. He has been called ”the historian of a human soul,” and it was in the crises of life that his feeling claimed poetical expression. When he heard of Lee's surrender ”The Conquered Banner” drooped its mournful folds over the heart-broken South. In his memorial address at Fredericksburg when the Southern soldiers were buried, he first read ”March of the Deathless Dead,” closing with the lines:

And the dead thus meet the dead, While the living' o'er them weep; And the men by Lee and Stonewall led, And the hearts that once together bled, Together still shall sleep.

June 28, 1883, I was in Lexington and saw the unveiling of Valentine's rec.u.mbent statue of General Lee in Was.h.i.+ngton and Lee University. At the conclusion of Senator Daniel's eloquent oration Father Ryan recited his poem, ”The Sword of Lee,” the first time that it had been heard.

In Lexington I was at a dinner where Father Ryan was a guest. He told a story of a reprobate Irishman, for whom he had stood G.o.dfather. Upon one occasion the man took too much liquor and, under its influence, killed a man, for which he was sentenced to a term in the penitentiary. Through the efforts of the Father he was, after a time, pardoned and employment secured for him. One evening he came to the priest's house intoxicated and asked permission to sleep in the barn.

”No,” said the Father, ”go sleep in the gutter.” ”Ah, Father, sure an'

I've shlept in the gutter till me bones is all racked with the rheumatism.” ”I can't help that; I can't let you sleep in the barn; you will smoke, you drunken beast, and set the barn on fire and maybe burn the house, and they belong to the parish.” ”Ah, Father, forgive me! I've been bad, very bad; I've murdered an' kilt an' shtole an'

been dhrunk, an' I've done a heap of low things besides, but low as I'm afther gettin', Father, I never got low enough to shmoke.” The man slept in the barn and the parish suffered no loss.

One evening at a supper at Governor Letcher's we were responding to the sentiment, ”Life.” I gave some verses which, in Father Ryan's view, were not serious enough for a subject so solemn. He looked at me through his wonderfully speaking eyes and answered me in his melodious voice:

Life is a duty--dare it, Life is a burden--bear it, Life is a thorn-crown--wear it; Though it break your heart in twain Seal your lips and hush your pain; Life is G.o.d--all else is vain.

”Yes, Father,” I said, and there was silence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: ST. MARY'S CHURCH, MOBILE.

FATHER RYAN'S LATE RESIDENCE ADJOINING By courtesy of P.J. Kenedy & Sons]

Always a wanderer, our Poet-Priest found his first real home, since his childhood, when pastor of St. Mary's Church in Mobile. To that home he pays a tribute in verse.

It was an enchanting solitude for the ”restless heart,”--the plain little church with its cross pointing the way upward, the front half-hidden by trees through which its window-eyes look out to the street. A short distance from the church and farther back was the priest's house, set in a bewilderment of trees and vines and shrubbery from which window, chimney, roof, and cornice peep out as if with inquisitive desire to see what manner of world lies beyond the forest.

Up into the silent skies Where the sunbeams veil the star, Up,--beyond the clouds afar, Where no discords ever mar, Where rests peace that never dies.

Here, amid the ”songs and silences,” he wrote ”just when the mood came, with little of study and less of art,” as he said, his thoughts leaping spontaneously into rhymes and rhythms which he called verses, objecting to the habit of his friends of giving them ”the higher t.i.tle of poems,” never dreaming of ”taking even lowest place in the rank of authors.”

I sing with a voice too low To be heard beyond to-day, In minor keys of my people's woe, But my songs will pa.s.s away.

To-morrow hears them not-- To-morrow belongs to fame-- My songs, like the birds', will be forgot, And forgotten shall be my name.

But a touch of prophecy adds the thought:

And yet who knows? Betimes The grandest songs depart, While the gentle, humble, and low-toned rhymes Will echo from heart to heart.

So the ”low-toned rhymes” of him to whom ”souls were always more than songs,” written ”at random--off and on, here, there, anywhere,” touch the heart and linger like remembered music in a long-gone twilight.

In 1872 Father Ryan travelled in Europe, visited Rome and had an audience with the Pope, of whom he wrote: