"No pent-up Utica contracts your powers,
But the whole boundless continent is yours,"
taken from his Epilogue to Cato, written in 1778.
Another Revolutionary poet was Philip Freneau; "that rascal Freneau," as Washington called him, when annoyed by the attacks upon his administration in Freneau's National Gazette. He was of Huguenot descent, was a classmate of Madison at Princeton College, was taken prisoner by the British during the war, and when the war was over, engaged in journalism, as an ardent supporter of Jefferson and the Democrats. Freneau's patriotic verses and political lampoons are now unreadable; but he deserves to rank as the first real American poet, by virtue of his Wild Honeysuckle, Indian Burying Ground, Indian Student, and a few other little pieces, which exhibit a grace and delicacy inherited, perhaps, with his French blood.
Indeed, to speak strictly, all of the "poets" hitherto mentioned were nothing but rhymers but in Freneau we meet with something of beauty and artistic feeling; something which still keeps his verses fresh. In his treatment of Indian themes, in particular, appear for the first time a sense of the picturesque and poetic {391} elements in the character and wild life of the red man, and that pensive sentiment which the fading away of the tribes toward the sunset has left in the wake of their retreating footsteps. In this Freneau anticipates Cooper and Longfellow, though his work is slight compared with the Leatherstocking Tales or Hiawatha. At the time when the Revolutionary War broke out the population of the colonies was over three millions; Philadelphia had thirty thousand inhabitants, and the frontier had retired to a comfortable distance from the sea-board. The Indian had already grown legendary to town dwellers, and Freneau fetches his Indian Student not from the outskirts of the settlement, but from the remote backwoods of the State:
"From Susquehanna's farthest springs,
Where savage tribes pursue their game
(His blanket tied with yellow strings),
A shepherd of the forest came."
Campbell "lifted"—in his poem O'Conor's Child—the last line of the following stanza from Freneau's Indian Burying Ground:
"By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews,
In vestments for the chase arrayed,
The hunter still the deer pursues—
The hunter and the deer a shade."
And Walter Scott did Freneau the honor to borrow, in Marmion, the final line of one of the {392} stanzas of his poem on the battle of Eutaw Springs:
"They saw their injured country's woe,
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, but left the shield."
Scott inquired of an American gentleman who wished him the authorship of this poem, which he had by heart, and pronounced it as fine a thing of the kind as there was in the language.