em."

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 epidem