Page:Adams - Songs of the Army of the Night.djvu/25

Rh him. "I only heard of Adams' death two days ago," wrote one of his Australian friends. "I cannot tell how much smaller and poorer the world seems to me now he has gone. He was the truest comrade, with all his inward loneliness. The very light of camaraderie shone from his soul. Except that he might accomplish the work laid upon him by his destiny and his hour, there was no care for self in him. And the tragedy of his life and sufferings was, I calmly and firmly believe, the greatest and most dreadful in our literary history. For what the wrongs of the oppressed and dispossessed were to him, let the "Songs of the Army of the Night" bear witness, but what he suffered from physical disease and personal sorrows, let only oblivion keep the knowledge of—what he endured from the tortures of frustrate ambition, we can guess."

It will be readily understood how the natural sensitiveness of an intensely high-strung temperament was accentuated by such suffering and disappointment, until it left its mark both in the exacting fastidiousness of his literary judgments and in the scathing severity of his denunciation of social hypocrisies. This fact will account for much that were else unaccountable, and perhaps in some cases repellent, in the occasionally pitiless invective of these "Songs of the Army of the Night"; on the other hand, the poems bear unmistakable testimony to the passionate tenderness and humanity of the heart which inspired them. Was there ever, since Shelley died, so fiery a hatred of injustice, so eager a sympathy with the cause of the poor and oppressed? In this respect also, Francis Adams' writings are the exact counterpart of his personality. No memory of him will dwell more abidingly in the minds of those who knew him than the occasions when, with magnetic eloquence, he would dilate on the people's wrongs—his beautiful expressive features and large