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.