England, whither he had gone to attend a meeting of the Society
of Friends.

The three tall volumes of the Princeton edition of the poems of
Philip Freneau bear the sub-title, "Poet of the American
Revolution." But our Revolution, in truth, never had an adequate
poet. The prose-men, such as Jefferson, rose nearer the height of
the great argument than did the men of rhyme. Here and there the
struggle inspired a brisk ballad like Francis Hopkinson's "Battle
of the Kegs," a Hudibrastic satire like Trumbull's "McFingal," or
a patriotic song like Timothy Dwight's "Columbia." Freneau
painted from his own experience the horrors of the British
prison-ship, and celebrated, in cadences learned from Gray and
Collins, the valor of the men who fell at Eutaw Springs. There
was patriotic verse in extraordinary profusion, but its literary
value is slight, and it reveals few moods of the American mind
that are not more perfectly conveyed through oratory, the
pamphlet, and the political essay. The immediate models of this
Revolutionary verse were the minor British bards of the
eighteenth century, a century greatly given to verse-writing, but
endowed by Heaven with the "prose-reason" mainly. The reader of
Burton E. Stevenson's collection of "Poems of American History"
can easily compare the contemporary verse inspired by the events
of the Revolution with the modern verse upon the same historic
themes. He will see how slenderly equipped for song were most of
the later eighteenth-century Americans and how unfavorable to
poetry was the tone of that hour.

Freneau himself suffered, throughout his long career, from the
depressing indifference of his public to the true spirit of