ution. I feel that I
am no longer so, therefore I regret the change. My heart sometimes seems
tired with beating, it wants rest like my eyelids, which feel oppressed
with so many watchings." Crevecoeur, an immigrant from Normandy, was
certainly no weakling, but he felt that the great idyllic American
adventure which he described so captivatingly in his chapter entitled
"What is an American"--was ending tragically in civil war. Another
whitesouled itinerant of that day was John Woolman of New Jersey, whose
"Journal," praised by Charles Lamb and Channing and edited by Whittier,
is finding more readers in the twentieth century than it won in the
nineteenth. "A man unlettered," said Whittier, "but with natural
refinement and delicate sense of fitness, the purity of whose heart
enters into his language." Woolman died at fifty-two in far-away York,
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