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