FATHER ABRAM J. RYAN

ABRAM J. RYAN

[1836-1886]

A

HANNIS TAYLOR

T the end of the Civil War, when the people of the South, draped

in mourning for their warrior dead, stood as mourners might stand in some dim cathedral at the bier of their own and only one, a funeral dirge was chanted by an unknown voice from an unseen shrine. All heads were bowed as the weird, soul-stirring strains of "The Conquered Banner," whose measure was taken from an old Gregorian hymn, drew a sob from every Southern heart.

Soon this wonderful poem, whose wail of woe swept over the South as the triumphant shout of the Marseillaise had swept over France, was set to music and sung in every household. Only those who lived in the South in that day, and passed under the spell of that mighty song can properly estimate its power as it fell upon the victims of a fallen cause. The fact that this dirge was not destined to immortality because the state of soul to which it was addressed was ephemeral did not at all impair its effect at the moment it was uttered. When all eyes were turned to the source from which the music came, its author proved to be a young Catholic priest, born in America of Irish parents, who transmitted to him all the poetic and mystic witchery of the Celtic temperament. From the fountain of his soul, which was Irish and Catholic, to its utmost depths, patriotic and devotional poems bubbled up as water flows. By birth and environment, the genius of Father Ryan was limited to two channels, within which it was imprisoned to the end. He sung only of the Southern Confederacy and the Catholic Church, at such odd times as a busy and devoted priest could find to sing; but his poetic genius was far beyond that of any other poet the South has produced since Edgar Allan Poe. Poe and Ryan were twin souls; the one a pagan mystic, the other a Christian mystic.

The lost cause became incarnate in the heart of Father Ryan, who cherished it as his forefathers had cherished the cause of Ireland. As a chaplain in the Southern Army, he appeared upon more than one battlefield, and to the cause he loved an idolized brother gave his life. His ode* in memory of his brother, Captain David J. Ryan, should live forever, for there is no deeper or more martial pathos even in "The Burial of Sir John Moore."

*Printed on p. 4636.

On its mystic and devotional side, Father Ryan's soul was as rich as a diamond-field of South Africa-the gems glistened everywhere. Great poetry, like great music, has always a national flavor. The exquisite spiritual imagery of the poet-priest was distinctively Celtic. It came in his blood from a land in which Christianity was, at the outset, tribal and monastic. In the "Song of the Mystic" he says:

"And I have seen Thoughts in the Valley

Ah me, how my spirit was stirred!—
And they wear holy veils on their faces,
Their footsteps can scarcely be heard;
They pass through the Valley like Virgins,

Too pure for the touch of a word."

And again in the poem "In Memory of Very Rev. J. B. Etienne":

"A shadow slept folded in vestments,
The dream of a smile on its face,
Dim, soft as the gleam after sunset,
That hangs like a halo of grace
Where the daylight had died in the Valley
And the twilight hath taken its place-
A shadow! but still on the mortal

There rested the tremulous trace

Of the joy of a spirit immortal,

Passed up to his God in His grace."

Father Ryan's dreamy mysticism and self-enclosed reticence clouded every detail of his life. When he spoke of himself it was always in a vague and indirect way, Thus it is a question whether he was born in Hagerstown, Maryland, or in Norfolk, Virginia, not earlier, perhaps, than 1836. I always inferred from what he said. that he was born in Norfolk; certainly that was the home of his early childhood. When he was a lad of seven or eight years his family removed to St. Louis, where he was trained under the Brothers of the Christian Schools. After the necessary preparatory studies he entered the ecclesiastical seminary at Niagara, New York. He told me that he was ordained a priest at St. Louis just after he became of age, at a time when he was in such delicate health that he was obliged to sit through the ceremony. At the end of the Civil War, in which he served as a Confederate chaplain, he was stationed at Nashville, afterward at Clarksville, Tennessee, and still later at Augusta, Georgia, where he founded and published for about five years the Banner of the South, a paper very influential in that sec