“This volume holds within its slim covers more restrained power, inward, incisive vision, and passionate pity than any volume of verse that has seen the light in the Southern Hemisphere (always, of course, excepting the complete ‘Poetical Works’ of the same author). _That_ is a bewildering book, a veritable thousand islands of passion, pathos, poetry, set in a restless, weary sea. . . The uncontrollable out-bursts of a noble, tender soul maddened by the misery and hypocrisy of our cannibal civilisation, This putrid death, This flesh-feast of the few, This social structure of red mud, This edifice of slime, Whose bricks are bones, whose mortar blood, Whose pinnacle is crime! Hemorrhages from the very vitals of one tortured in Hell. Not the quaint conglomeration of bottomless brimstone and three-tined forks, but the now non-exploding self-adjusting patent Hell ‘of our own manufacture,’ whose seventh hopeless circle centres in the old village by the Thames—(trade mark, ‘Commerce and Christ.’)”—SYDNEY JEPHCOTT, “_Australian Standard_.” AN AUSTRALIAN POET. “Francis Adams is about the least Australian of the Australian poets. There is in his work lack of wattle-bloom and waratah, rollicking rhyme and galloping jingle. There is much of old-world problems and old-world troubles, which are old-world simply because we here have not had time enough to breed the fever germ to a ravaging pestilence. We have, however, the fever germ, and Francis Adams does our young country yeoman service in awakening a fear for the future in his latest book of poems, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The book is not all night though. It is a cantata without music. The first part is all gloom; angry threatening clouds bar out the light of the coming dawn; footsteps of the weary and fallen plash along in the mud and darkness; the lightning of angry steel, gleaming phosphorescent in the night; the hoarse hum of famished millions moiling along with a dim yearning for a bloody vengeance, contribute the details of a grim picture of realistic misery. The first part deserves the title given to the whole book, ‘Songs of the Army of the Night.’ The third part is perturbed and stormy, the sea heaving and surging after a tempest; but already the day is breaking, and young hope is felt in the warmth of the sun’s first rays. The third part might be justly termed ‘Songs of the Dawn.’ The second part is hot and heavy with the languorous heat of the tropics. . . . The whole book is a hymn in praise of fodder. The people march hungry, hoarse with lack of sustenance, gripping their firelocks with feverish, skeleton hands, glaring fiercely with famished eyes towards the granaries of the wealthy. . . . This is the sermon of Nature: ‘If you would be good, eat.’ It is