Sea Rest
Biloxi, Mississippi
August 27th, 1882

My Very Dear Friend:
Your kind note reached me yesterday. To-day is a rainy Sunday. Silver showers follow one another, and the old sea, out there a hundred yards away, seems glad, and so does the sad-looking earth. A rainy day makes every high-strung temperament sympathetic and thoughtful. I like such days, for the mysteries of clouds and waters affect me like music.

So you like my prelude to the poem. I am going to make it sound in strange keys. The strange is always sacred; and is not everything strange with the strangeness of God? I reverence a grain of sand. It is a white little cradle where the Divine is resting and dreaming. Ah me! the world has eyes, but it sees not. The retina of my eyes reaches right down into my heart. I reckon if I have any power over people (and I know I have), it comes from the truth in my temperament. Everything is poetry to me, from the smile of a child to the song of an angel. But I am straying away.

The man of the thirteenth century is an imagined person. I merely dreamed of him. I put him back six centuries from our day, for I think the past is so sadly holy and so holily sad. Every present is a glare; it dazzles and blinds. But the past, which is a long, beautiful aisle of human memories, leads the feet of my thought up to the shrine of the True. Every history is a sacred scripture to those who read its pages right. Eternal facts are only veils like those worn by nuns, hiding the beautiful, whose highest, truest, holiest name is self-sacrifice.

In a quiet way I am writing a work undertoned by that idea. It will soon be completed; but none shall read a printed page of it until I shall have gone away from the land of the living.

The longer I live the more I love and reverence the cloister life, and the more clearly I see why Christ was obliged to make marriage a sacrament to guard that state of life from becoming a snare, a horror, and a ruin. The older we grow we ought to be like the sea, which grows deeper the farther it is from the shore.

But I wander again- blame that mysterious rain, and do not blame me, so "Adios."

Faithfully Yours in Our Lord,
A. J. Ryan