Bliss Perry, The American spirit in lierature: a chronicle of great interpreters

[69] 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