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.