life is reflected in the tone of her sentimental elegies, epistles, descriptive poems, and religious lyrics, in the style of the English poets of the first half of the century. Her daughter, Mrs. Margaretta Faugeres, who published her own poems with those of her mother in 1793, shows in her poem on the Hudson the growing attention to native scenery. The inquiring reader may find all the imitative qualities of our early lyric poets if he will consult the very inclusive Original Poems, Serious and Entertaining, of Paul Allen (1775-1826), whose facile and graceful verse is indicative of English influences all the way from Prior to Cowper.
Aside from the lyrics of Freneau, the two original strains in our early lighter verse are the humorous poems of Thomas Green Fessenden and of Royall Tyler,[1] and the nature lyrics of Alexander Wilson. Fessenden contributed humorous poems of New England country life to Dennie's Farmer's Weekly Museum, and these were afterwards published in his Original Poems. To this same magazine and also to Dennie's Port Folio, Royall Tyler contributed pictures and studies in verse of American environment and character which are worth all the pretentious imitations of his contemporaries. The lyrics scattered throughout the pages of Alexander Wilson's Ornithology and afterwards printed in his collected poems merit more attention than they have heretofore received. Wilson was scientist and poet enough to celebrate the osprey, the Baltimore bird, the hummingbird, and the bluebird in true nature lyrics which, together with those of Freneau, are not unworthy forerunners of Bryant's.
Philip Freneau was born in New York of Huguenot ancestry in 1752, and died near Freehold, New Jersey, in 1832. His long and eventful life was spent in a variety of pursuits. After he graduated from Princeton in 1771, he was author, editor, government official, trader, and farmer. As regards the genesis of his poems, two facts in his life are especially important. His newspaper work encouraged a fatal production of the satirical and humorous verse that gave him reputation; and his trading voyages inspired poems descriptive of the scenery of the southem islands, and made possible what is perhaps his most original and distinctive work, his naval ballads.
- ↑ See also Book II, Chaps, ii, iii, and vi.
