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.

The American drama and American prose fiction had their beginnings
during the period now under review. A company of English players came
to this country in 1752 and made the tour of many of the principal
towns. The first play acted here by professionals on a public stage
was the _Merchant of Venice_, which was given by the English company at
Williamsburg, Va., in 1752. The first regular theater building was at
Annapolis, Md., where in the same year this troupe p