Page "Henry Kendall (poet)" Paragraph 9

Kendall had indeed lost heart ; he drifted into drinking and Alexander Sutherland in his essay draws a lurid picture of the depths into which the poet had fallen.

It is true that he had the authority of Kendall's poem " On a Street ", but years afterwards George Gordon McCrae told the present writer that Kendall " made the worst of everything including himself ".

McCrae had no doubt about Kendall having at times given way to excessive drinking, but stated positively that he had never actually seen him the worse for drink.

McCrae was a good friend to Kendall and he had many other friends in spite of his retiring and sensitive nature.

But his friends could not save him from himself, and his two years in Melbourne were among the most miserable of his life.

A pathetic letter is still in existence, in which Kendall tells McCrae that he could not go to Gordon's funeral because he was penniless.

In December 1870 he was charged with forging and uttering a cheque but found not guilty on the ground of insanity.

Unable to support his family, he was forced back to Sydney by poverty, ill health and drunkenness.

Intervals of dogged literary effort alternated with lapses into melancholia.

His wife had to return to her mother and Kendall became a derelict ; in early 1873 he spent four months in the Gladesville Hospital for the Insane.

In 1873 Kendall was taken in by the Fagan brothers, timber merchants near Gosford, and was afterwards given a position in the business of one of the brothers, Michael Fagan, at Camden Haven.

There he stayed six years and found again his self respect.

Writing in October 1880 to George Gordon McCrae he said, referring to his employer, " I want you to know the bearer.

He is the man who led me out of Gethsemane and set me in the sunshine ".