etts Legislature, because he did not wish to be confounded
with the author of the _Age of Reason_. "Dim are those names erstwhile
in battle loud," and many an old Revolutionary worthy who fought for
liberty with sword and pen is now utterly forgotten, or remembered only
by some phrase which has become a current quotation. Here and there a
line has, by accident, survived to do duty as a motto or inscription,
while all its context is buried in oblivion. Few have read any thing
more of Jonathan M. Sewall's, for example, than the couplet,

"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 class-mate 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 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 backw