PHILIP FRENEAU (1752-1832)

Freneau was of Huguenot descent. His grandfather, André Fresneau, a refugee from France, had landed in New York in 1707 and had established himself as an importer of wines. His business capacity was inherited by his son, and it was into a home of wealth and refinement that the grandson, Philip Freneau, was born in January, 1752. The boy was reared among books. His father, a lover of the arts, surrounded his children with refining influences. The future poet was carefully fitted for college by a tutor and at the age of sixteen was matriculated in the sophomore class at Princeton, graduating three years later with James Madison, H. H. Brackenridge and others who were destined to become known.

The Freneau family now lost its wealth save for an estate in New Jersey, a plantation to which the poet retired at intervals during the rest of his life. It was from here that he sent forth his early pamphlets satirizing the British at the opening of the war. During the years 1775 to 1778 he was in the West Indies in a business capacity and while there he wrote his distinctive poem The House of Night.' On his second trip to the islands in 1779 he was captured by the British and confined for several months on a prison ship in New York harbor. Discharged at length on account of his physical condition, he retired to New Jersey and wrote his well-known long poem The British Prison Ship' which he issued in 1779.

Recovered from his illness, he secured a position in the Philadelphia post office and gave all his leisure time to the writing of poetry, the most of which appeared in The Freeman's Journal. Later he became captain of a coasting vessel. After his marriage in 1790 he became editor successively of the New York Daily Advertiser, the Philadelphia National Gazette, the Jersey Chronicle, and the New York Time-Piece and Literary Companion, to all of which he contributed many poems. During the last twenty-five years of his life he was a farmer on his estate in New Jersey, though at times he made voyages to the Azores and to other ports. He died from exposure during a winter storm in 1832.

Freneau made collections of his poems in 1786, 1788, 1795, 1809, and 1815. For the edition of 1795 he set the type with his own hands and did the presswork on his own press. The most complete account of his life and work is in Pattee's Edition of the Poems of Philip Freneau,

ACASTO

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This might we do if warm'd by that bright
coal
Snatch'd from the altar of seraphic fire,
Which touch'd Isaiah's lips, or if the spirit
Of Jeremy and Amos, prophets old,
Should fire the breast; but yet I call the muse
And what we can will do. I see. I see
A thousand kingdoms rais'd, cities and men
Num'rous as sand upon the ocean shore;
Th' Ohio then shall glide by many a town
Of note: and where the Mississippi stream
By forests shaded now runs weeping on, 25
Nations shall grow and states not less in

fame

Than Greece and Rome of old: we too shall

boast

Our Alexanders, Pompeys, heroes, kings
That in the womb of time yet dormant lie
Waiting the joyful hour for life and light. 30