... the ancient and modern states of the arts and of society, Crusades, Commerce, Hanseatic League, Copernicus, Kepler, Newton, Galileo, Herschel, Descartes, Bacon, Printing Press, Magnetic Needle, Geographic Discoveries, Federal System in America. Freneau had shared all this prophetic enthusiasm, and had expressed it even before the war, partly in an actual commencement poem on "The Rising Glory of America" and partly in a series of eighteen "Pictures of Columbus." Just after graduation he had written: 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, 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 lye Waiting the joyful hour of life and light. After the war, however, he did not rejoin the increasing choir who were singing this kind of choral. His most interesting bit of prophecy, which must have seemed to his contemporaries to be a piece of the airiest fancy, has been amazingly verified more than a century after he wrote it. This is "The Progress of Balloons," written in the jaunty tone of "The Political Balance": The stagemen, whose gallopers scarce have the power Through the dirt to convey you ten miles in an hour, When advanc'd to balloons shall so furiously drive You'll hardly know whether you're dead or alive. The man who at Boston sets out with the sun, If the wind should be fair, may be with us at one, At Gunpowder Ferry drink whiskey at three And at six be at Edentown, ready for tea. (The machine shall be order'd, we hardly need say, To travel in darkness as well as by day) At Charleston by ten he for sleep shall prepare, And by twelve the next day be the devil knows where. * * * * * If Britain should ever disturb us again, (As they threaten to do in the next George's reign) No doubt they will play us a set of new tunes, And pepper us well from their fighting balloons. * * * * * Such wonders as these from balloons shall arise-- And the giants of old that assaulted the skies With their Ossa on Pelion, shall freely confess That all they attempted was nothing to this. This, of course, was newspaper poetry, and Freneau, for long years of his life, was a newspaper man. Even his lines "To Sir Toby," a slaveholding sugar-planter in Jamaica, spirited as they are, are in effect an open letter in protest against human slavery, and they were printed in the _National Gazette_ in 1792.