Of Adams’s prose works the most remarkable is _A Child of the Age_, written when he was only eighteen, and first printed under the title of _Leicester, an Autobiography_, an extraordinarily fascinating, if somewhat morbid story, which deserves to be ranked with _Wuthering Heights_ and _The Story of an African Farm_, among notable works of immature imagination. He told me that it was written almost spontaneously: it just “came to him” to write it, and he himself felt that it was an abnormal book. Of the _Songs of the Army of the Night_, he said that they were intended to do what had never before been done--to express what might be the feelings of a member of the working classes as he found out the hollowness, to him, of our culture and learning; hence the pitiless invective which shows itself in many of the poems. As surely as Elliott’s “Corn Law Rhymes” spoke the troubled spirit of their age, so do these fierce keen lyrics, on fire alike with love and with hate, express the passionate sympathies and deep resentments of the socialist movement in its revolt from a sham philanthropy and patriotism. No rebel poet has ever “arraigned his country and his day” in more burning words than Adams in his stanzas “To England.” I, whom you fed with shame and starved with woe, I wheel above you, Your fatal Vulture, for I hate you so, I almost love you. But the _Songs_ are not only denunciatory; they have a closer and more personal aspect, as in the infinitely compassionate “One among so Many,” which endears them to the heart of the reader as only a few choice books are ever endeared. In their strange mixture of sweetness and bitterness, they are very typical of Francis Adams himself: he was at one moment, and in one aspect, the most simple and lovable of beings; at another, the most aggressively critical and fastidious.[20]