Read passages which deal with nature for Crèvecoeur's observation on plant and animal life. Read the closing essay in comparison with Rousseau's "Émile" for its romantic idealization of primitive life. Compare this essay with the picture of frontier life as presented in "The Deerslayer" or "The Last of the Mohicans." Note the resemblances to Châteaubriand's "René." Read the opening chapters or divisions of Thoreau's "Walden" and compare with the Crèvecoeur "Letters" in point of the contrasting views on property, labor, and citizenship. Read Mary Antin's "The Promised Land" for the differences in the America to which Crèvecoeur came and the America which she found. CHAPTER VI THE POETRY OF THE REVOLUTION AND PHILIP FRENEAU With the Revolutionary War there was naturally a great output of printed matter. Controversial pamphlets, state papers, diaries, letters, and journals, plays (with prologues and epilogues), songs, ballads and satires, all swelled the total. No one can fully understand the Revolution or the period after it who does not read extensively in this material; yet, taken in its length and breadth, the prose and most of the verse are important as history rather than as literature. Out of the numerous company of writers who were producing while Franklin was an aging man and while Crèvecoeur was an American farmer, one, Philip Freneau, may be considered as chief representative, and two others, Francis Hopkinson and John Trumbull, deserve a briefer comment. Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791), the Philadelphian, was well characterized in a much-quoted letter from John Adams to his wife in August, 1776: At this shop I met Mr. Francis Hopkinson, late a mandamus councillor of New Jersey, now a member of the Continental Congress, who ... was liberally educated, and is a painter and a poet.... He is one of your pretty little, curious, ingenious men.... He is genteel and well-bred and is very social. I wish I had leisure and tranquillity of mind to amuse myself with those elegant and ingenious arts of painting, sculpture, statuary, architecture and music. But I have not. Undoubtedly Hopkinson's work savors of the dilettante throughout; yet part of its historical significance is inherent in this fact, for Hopkinson is one of the earliest examples of talented versatility in American life. He had virtues to complement the accomplishments half enviously cited by John Adams. He was a learned judge, a stalwart revolutionist, a practical man of affairs, and a humorist.