Page:Library of Southern literature, Volume One (1909).djvu/42

2 tributes to his memory by Bishop C. B. Galloway and Dr. W. B. Murrah, his remains were laid to rest in the city cemetery.

As a learned, and at times brilliant and profound preacher, Dr. Adams was perhaps best known. Poetical and philosophical, spiritual and logical, scholarly and original—it is not surprising that he came to eminence. But as a man of letters more than as an educator and preacher is he entitled to distinction. Considering his opportunities, his scholarship was extraordinary, as his carefully kept ledger notebooks as well as his publications abundantly attest. He was master of Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; and he could read with ease in three or four modern languages besides his own. To various church papers he was a frequent and versatile contributor. In controversy he was skilful, ready, formidable. Fiction, in various forms, he essayed in his later years, leaving five incomplete stories and several legends among his manuscripts. But poetry was his passion and his luxury, even from boyhood; and his place and rank as a poet may be appraised by the two volumes which he contributed to Southern literature.

The author himself culled his poems carefully for the volume published in 1882, entitled 'Aunt Peggy and Other Poems.' "Aunt Peggy" is a narrative poem of about thirty-one hundred lines, broken into ten chapters. Written in short iambic couplets, discursively narrative, the poem as a whole is disappointing. The pictures of a simple, hardy country life in Mississippi seventy or eighty years ago are interesting; the old field-school, in chapter seven, especially so, because of its graphic and humorous portrayal. The tenth chapter is the longest and as poetry the best. In it there are richer, softer tints, and the poet sings to the flute, rather than to the harp. The flickerings of youthful sentiment in "Aunt Peggy's" aged, widowed heart are revealed with tender grace, and the closing apostrophe to Memory is a noble utterance.

The twenty-seven other poems in the volume with "Aunt Peggy" are mostly of a personal and religious nature. "Bury Him in the Sea," on the burial of Dr. Coke at sea, is a spirited poem with fine imagery and lofty sentiments. "Growing Gray," "Never so Much as Now," "While we May," "Hie Jacet," and several others in the minor key attest, in contemplative mood, genuine inspiration and artistic execution. "Old Papers" and "Even with the World" are fanciful and have a note of humor with a serious undertone.

But the measure of Dr. Adams as a poet should be taken by his first volume 'Enscotidion; or, Shadow of Death,' published in 1876, with an Introduction by Rev. R. A. Young, D.D. In youth the author had versified a negro's grotesque dream of a visit to the