Chapter 7

Silence came--the silence that meant victory and defeat. Whose was the victory? The night gave no answer, and the lonely man still paced up and down the deck of the _Minden_. Then day dawned in a glory in the east, and a glory in the heart of the anxious watcher. In that first thrill of joy and triumph our majestic anthem was formed.

Key took from his pocket an old letter, and on its blank page pencilled the opening lines of the song. In the boat which took him back to Baltimore he finished the poem, and in his hotel made a copy for the press. The next day the lines were put into type by Samuel Sands, an apprentice in the office of the _Baltimore American_, who had been deserted in the general rush to see the battle as being too young to be trusted at the front, and that evening they were sung in the Holliday Street Theatre. The next day the air was heard upon the streets of Baltimore from every boy who had been gifted with a voice or a whistle, and "The Star-Spangled Banner" was soon waving over the musical domain as victoriously as it had floated from the ramparts of Fort McHenry.

It is in the great moments of life that a man gives himself to the world, and in the giving parts from nothing of himself, for in the gift he but expands his own nature and keeps himself in greater measure than before. May not he to whom our great anthem came through the battle-storm smile pityingly upon the futile efforts of to-day to supply a national song that shall eclipse the noble lines born of patriotism and battle ardor and christened in flame?

Thus it was that Francis Scott Key reached the high tide of life before the defences of the Monumental City, and to Baltimore he returned when that tide was ebbing away, and in view of the old fort, under the battlements of which he had fallen to unfathomable depths of suffering and risen to immeasurable heights of triumphant joy, he crossed the bar into the higher tide beyond. On a beautiful hill Baltimore has erected a stately monument to the memory of the man who linked her name with the majestic anthem which gives fitting voice to our national hopes.

Away on the other edge of our continent, in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, another noble shaft tells the world that "the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves" over all our land and knows no distinctions of North, South, East, or West.

In Olivet Cemetery, in the old historic city of Frederick, Maryland, is the grave of Francis Scott Key. Over it stands a marble column supporting a statue of Key, his poet face illumined by the art of the sculptor, his arms outstretched, his left hand bearing a scroll inscribed with the lines of "The Star-Spangled Banner," while on the pedestal sits Liberty, holding the flag for which those immortal lines were written.

Thus, perpetuated in granite, the noble patriot stands, looking over the town to which he long ago gave this message:

But if ever, forgetful of her past and present glory, she shall cease to be "the land of the free and the home of the brave," and become the purchased possession of a company of stock-jobbers and speculators; if her people are to become the vassals of a great moneyed corporation, and to bow down to her pensioned and privileged nobility; if the patriots who shall dare to arraign her corruptions and denounce her usurpations are to be sacrificed upon her gilded altar,--such a country may furnish venal orators and presses, but the soul of national poetry will be gone. That muse will "never bow the knee in mammon's fane." No, the patriots of such a land must hide their shame in her deepest forests, and her bards must hang their harps upon the willows. Such a people, thus corrupted and degraded,

"Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust from whence they sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung."

"THE POET-PRIEST"

FATHER RYAN

My first meeting with Father Ryan was at the Atlantic Hotel in Norfolk, in which town he had spent the first seven years of his life, his parents having emigrated from Limerick and found a home there a short time before his birth. He has been claimed by a number of cities, and the dates of his nativity, as assigned by biographers, range from 1834 to 1840, 1839 being the one best established. He told me that his early memories of his Norfolk home were especially associated with figs and oysters, the oysters there being the largest and finest he had ever seen, they and the figs seeming to "rhyme with his appetite." Then he told me an oyster story:

"A negro boatman was rowing some people down the river, among them two prominent politicians who were discussing an absent one. 'He has no more backbone than an oyster,' said one. The boatman laughed, and said, 'Skuse me, marsers, but if you-all gemmen don' know no mo' 'bout politicians dan you does 'bout oyschers you don' know much. No mo' backbone dan a oyscher! Why, oyschers has as much backbone as folks has, en ef you cuts into 'em lengfwise a little way ter one side en looks at 'em close you'll see dar backbone's jes' lak we all's backbone is. De only diffunce is de oyscher's backbone is ter one side, jes' whar it ought ter be, 'stead er in de middle. Dat's de reason I t'ink de debbil mus' er tuck a han' en he'ped ter mek we alls, en you know de Lord says, Let _us_ mek man; dat shows dat He didn' do hit all by Hese'f; ef He had He'd a meked we all's backbone ter de side whar de oyscher's is, ter pertect us, en put our shin bones behime our legs, whar dey wouldn't all de time git skint, en put our calfs in de front.'"

My impression of Father Ryan was of being in the presence of a great power--something indefinable and indescribable, but invincibly sure. He was of medium height, and his massive head seemed to bend by its own weight, giving him a somewhat stooped appearance. His hair, brown, with sunny glints touching it to gold, was brushed back from his wide, high forehead, falling in curls around his pale face and over his shoulders. I recall with especial distinctness the dimple in his chin, a characteristic of many who have been very near to me, for which reason it attracted my attention when appearing in a face new to me. His eyes were his greatest beauty,--Irish blue, under gracefully arched brows, and luminous with the sunshine that has sparkled in the eyes of his race in all the generations, caught by looking skyward for a light that dawned not upon earth. His expression was sad, and the beautiful smile that illumined his face, radiating compassion, kindness, gentleness and the humor of the Kelt, made me think of a brilliant noontide sun shining across a grave.

We discussed Folk Lore, and he said that some of the best lessons were taught in the Folk Lore of the plantation negro. One of his sermons was on "Obstinacy," illustrated by a story told him by an old colored man:

"Marser, does you know de reason dat de crab walks back'ards? Well, hit's dis away: when de Lord wuz mekin' uv de fishes He meked de diffunt parts en put 'em in piles, de legs in one pile, de fins in anudder, en de haids in anudder. Do' de crab wan't no fish, He meked hit at de same time. Afterwards He put 'em tergedder en breaved inter 'em de bref er life. He stuck all de fishes' haids on, but de crab wuz obstreperous en he say, 'Gib me my haid; I gwine put hit on myse'f.' De Lord argufied wid him but de crab wouldn' listen, en he say he gwine put hit on. So de Lord gin him his haid en 'course he put hit on back'ards. Den he went ter de Lord en ax' Him ter put hit straight, but de Lord wouldn' do hit, en He tole him he mus' go back'ards all his life fer his obstinacy. En so 'tis wid some people."

Father Ryan told me that one of the greatest obstacles with which he had to contend in his dealings with people was the lack of ethic sensitiveness which rendered them oblivious to the harm of deviations from principle which seemed not to result in great evil. People who would not steal articles of value did not hesitate to cheat in car-fare, taking the view that the company got enough out of the public without their small contribution. He said, "They are like two very religious old ladies who, driving through a toll-gate, asked the keeper the rate. Being newly appointed, he looked into his book and read so much for a man and a horse. The woman who was driving whipped up the horse, calling out, 'G'lang, Sally, we goes free. We are two old maids and a mare.' On they went without paying."

When Abram Ryan was seven years old the family moved to St. Louis, where the boy attended the schools of the Christian Brothers, in his twelfth year entering St. Mary's Seminary, in Perry County, Missouri. He completed his preparation for the work to which his life was dedicated, in the Ecclesiastical Seminary at Niagara, New York. Upon ordination he was placed in charge of a parish in Missouri.

On a boat going down the canal from Lynchburg to Lexington, where he was a fellow-passenger with us, he met his old friend, John Wise, and entered into conversation with him, in the course of which he made the statement that he came from Missouri. "All the way from Pike?" quoted Mr. Wise. "No," replied Father Ryan, "my name is _not_ Joe Bowers, I have _no_ brother Ike," whereupon he sang the old song, "Joe Bowers," in a voice that would have lifted any song into the highest realms of music.

He recited his poem, "In Memoriam," written for his brother David, who was killed in battle, one stanza of which impressed me deeply because of the longing love in his voice when he spoke the lines:

Thou art sleeping, brother, sleeping In thy lonely battle grave; Shadows o'er the past are creeping, Death, the reaper, still is reaping, Years have swept and years are sweeping Many a memory from my keeping, But I'm waiting still and weeping For my beautiful and brave.

The readers of his poetry are touched by its pathetic beauty, but only they who have heard his verses in the tones of his deep, musical voice can know of the wondrous melody of his lines.

When I said to him that I wished he would write a poem on Pickett's charge at Gettysburg, he replied:

"It has been put into poetry. Every flower that blooms on that field is a poem far greater than I could write. There are some things too great for me to attempt. Pickett's charge at Gettysburg is one of them."

A lady who chanced to be on the boat with us repeated Owen Meredith's poem of "The Portrait." At its close he said with sad earnestness, "I am sorry to hear you recite that. Please never do it again. It is a libel on womanhood."

It may be that he was thinking of "Ethel," the maiden whom, it is said, he loved in his youth, from whom he parted because Heaven had chosen them both for its own work, and his memories deepened the sacredness with which all women were enshrined in his thought. She was to be a nun and he a priest, and thus he tells of their parting:

One night in mid of May their faces met As pure as all the stars that gazed on them. They met to part from themselves and the world; Their hearts just touched to separate and bleed; Their eyes were linked in look, while saddest tears Fell down, like rain, upon the cheeks of each: They were to meet no more.

The "great brown, wond'ring eyes" of the girl went with him on his way through life, shadowed like the lights of a dim cathedral, but luminous with love and sacrifice. How much of the story he tells in pathetic verse was his very own perhaps no one may ever know, but the reader feels that it was Father Ryan himself who, after "years and years and weary years," walked alone in a place of graves and found "in a lone corner of that resting-place" a solitary grave with its veil of "long, sad grass" and, parting the mass of white roses that hid the stone, beheld the name he had given the girl from whom he had parted on that mid-May night.

"ULLAINEE."

Those who were nearest him thought that the vein of sadness winding through his life and his poetry was in memory of the girl who loved and sacrificed and died. When they marvelled over the mournful minor tones in his melodious verse he made answer:

Go stand on the beach of the blue boundless deep, When the night stars are gleaming on high, And hear how the billows are moaning in sleep, On the low-lying strand by the surge-beaten steep, They're moaning forever wherever they sweep. Ask them what ails them: they never reply; They moan on, so sadly, but will not tell you why! Why does your poetry sound like a sigh? The waves will not answer you; neither shall I.

At the beginning of the war Father Ryan was appointed a chaplain in the Army of Northern Virginia, but often served as a soldier. He was in New Orleans in 1862 when an epidemic broke out, and devoted himself to the care of the victims. Having been accused of refusing to bury a Federal he was escorted by a file of soldiers into the presence of General Butler, who accosted him with great sternness:

"I am told that you refused to bury a dead soldier because he was a Yankee."

"Why," answered Father Ryan in surprise, facing the hated general without a tremor, "I was never asked to bury him and never refused. 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 passed.

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 recumbent statue of General Lee in Washington 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 godfather. 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 God--all else is vain.

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

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 title 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 pass 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:

I saw his face to-day; he looks a chief Who fears nor human rage, nor human guile; Upon his cheeks the twilight of a grief, But in that grief the starlight of a smile.

In 1883 he began an extended lecture tour in support of a charity of deep interest in the South, but his failing health brought his effort to an early close.

The fiery soul of Father Ryan soon burned out its frail setting. In his forty-eighth year he retired to a Franciscan Monastery in Louisville, intending to make the annual retreat and at its close to finish his "Life of Christ," begun some time before. He arrived at the Convent of St. Bonifacius March 23, 1886. The environment of the old Monastery, the first German Catholic establishment in Louisville, built in 1838, is not attractive. The building is on a narrow side street filled with small houses and shops crowded up to the sidewalk. But the interior offered a peaceful home for which the world-weary heart of the Poet-Priest was grateful. From a balcony where he would sit, breathing in the cool air and resting his soul in the unbroken silence, he looked across the courtyard shaded by beautiful trees, filled with flowers and trellised vines, his heart revelling in the riot of color, the wilderness of greenery, all bathed in golden floods of sunshine and canopied with an ever-changing and ever-glorious stretch of azure sky.

Father Ryan was never again to go out from this peaceful harbor into the tumultuous billows of world-life. He had been there but a short time when his physician told him that he must prepare for death. "Why," he said, "I did that long years ago." The time of rest for which he had prayed in years gone by was near at hand.

My feet are wearied and my hands are tired, My soul oppressed-- And I desire, what I have long desired-- Rest--only rest.

* * * * *

The burden of my days is hard to bear, But God knows best; And I have prayed--but vain has been my prayer For rest--sweet rest.

In his last days his mind was filled with reminiscences of the war and he would arouse the monastery and tell the priests and brothers, "Go out into the city and tell the people that trouble is at hand. War is coming with pestilence and famine and they must prepare to meet the invader."

On Thursday of Holy Week, April 22, 1886, the weary life drifted out upon the calm sea of Eternal Peace.

"BACON AND GREENS"

DR. GEORGE WILLIAM BAGBY

We, the general and I, were the first to be informed of the supernal qualities of bacon and greens. All Virginians were aware of the prime importance of this necessary feature of an Old Dominion dinner, but that "a Virginian could not be a Virginian without bacon and greens" was unknown to us until the discoverer of that ethnological fact. Dr. George William Bagby, read us his lecture on these cheerful comestibles. We were the first to see the frost that "lies heavy on the palings and tips with silver the tops of the butter-bean poles, where the sere and yellow pods are chattering in the chilly breeze."

In the early days after the war Dr. Bagby had a pleasant habit of dropping into our rooms at the Exchange Hotel in Richmond, and as soon as the ink was dry on that combination of humor and pathos and wisdom to which he gave the classic title of "Bacon and Greens" he brought it and read it to us. I can still follow the pleasant ramble on which he took us in fancy through a plantation road, the innumerable delights along the way never to be appreciated to their full extent by any but a real Virginian brought up on bacon and greens, and the arrival at the end of the journey, where we were taken possession of as if we "were the Prodigal Son or the last number of the _Richmond Enquirer_." My eyes were the first to fill with tears over the picture of the poor old man at the last, sitting by the dying fire in the empty house, while the storm raged outside.