"Father Ryan," as he is familiarly called, was Alabama's sweet singer. He was a born poet, and sang because he could not help it. Emanating from the heart, his plaintive strains go straight to the head. Yet he wrote only at intervals. Moved by the afflatus which only a poet feels, he would now and then take up his poetic pen and give voice to the minstrelsy of his soul. His verse is merely fugitive snatches of song springing from an imagination essentially poetic, and a heart subdued by religious emotion. In no sense was poetry a profession with this charming lyrist, for he himself tells us that his verses "were written at random--off and on, here, there, anywhere--just when the mood came, with little of study and less of art, and always in a hurry." Leaping warm from the heart and taking the wings of poesy, his thought throbs with virility, and makes an appeal to the heart of another with a force that is irresistible; visions of matchless beauty rose continually before his imperial imagination and sought vent in song. Had Father Ryan subjected his thought to the lapidary finish of the professional poet, it is doubtful if it would now be so popular. He wrote as he was moved, the fervid thought seizing the first words within reach as a vehicle, and thus they fall on the ear of the world. Simple songs his poems are, generally melancholy, meditative, pensive, the chief virtue of them being that they touch the heart. His thoughts seem to move in popular orbits in search of objects invested with the plaintive. It is not the weirdness so often met with in Poe that one encounters in the poetry of Ryan, but the touch of moaning, the sadness of a burdened heart yearning and burning for that which it has not, but hopes for and looks for in other realms yet unrevealed. Resounding corridors of gloom, dimly lighted vestibules, processions of mourners moving till lost in darkness, the chimes of melancholy airs heard by mystic ears, the muffled footfall in mysterious darkness, the touch of vanished hands, the outreach of timorous arms through the gloom for a kindred touch, the sighing of a soul for its inheritance--these are the elements which resound his verses through. Much of his poetry savors of his theologic thought and environment, and, naturally enough, the object frequently pertains to that dear to the devout Catholic; but it is not about the substance of his thought that we here speak, but of his undoubted genius as a poet. Equal objection might prevail against much that is written by other poets, as, for instance, the substance of some of Poe's productions, whose "Annabel Lee" is heathen throughout, but it is poetic in its every syllable. The symbols and paraphernalia of his church, its worship, and all that pertains to it may be encountered in one way or another in the poetry of Ryan, but the undoubted genius with which it is wrought and molded into verse is that which fascinates the lover of poetry.