Page:For remembrance, soldier poets who have fallen in the war, Adcock, 1920.djvu/319

Rh one of them is a guardian of a name, and of a nationhood that has suddenly been revealed to the world. More than that—Australia has at last found a soul—there is no denying that—no denying that before the war we were the most soulless people alive, as a nation.... The life of a man is as nothing compared to the continuity of a nation, to the greatness of its soul.'

That is a great saying, but he meant it, and sealed it with his blood. If Adrian Stephen wrote no poetry—and I am not sure that he did not—it was not because he had none in him. An Australian in the R.F.A., and Four Plays, published since his death by W. C. Penfold, of Sydney, and by the Australian Book Company in London, contain his letters home, with the diary he kept at the front, and the plays he wrote between twenty and twenty-three, two of which were produced, and all of which show that he had the true dramatic instinct, and gifts of satirical humour and characterisation that justify one of his critics in the opinion that had