How he at length deliberately turned from the muse of his choice, and how after a long experience with the world of actual affairs he exchanged his old poetic ideals for those of mere reason and common sense, we have attempted to show. Here was a man equipped by nature for a true poet, a man with a message, yet dwarfed and transformed by his environment. America was not ready for her singer. It took half a century more to make way in the wilderness for the new message that had been whispered to Freneau in his young manhood. Had he been a great world-poet, he would have been heard despite all difficulties; he would have trampled down the barriers about him and have compelled his age to listen, but the task was beyond him. America, to this day, has produced no poet who single-handed and alone could have performed such a labor of Hercules. Sadly Freneau turned to other things. He has never been adequately recognized. Had the first edition of his poems, published the same year as the Kilmarnock edition of Burns, been an English book, it long ago would have figured largely in the histories of the romantic and naturalistic movement which made possible the great outburst of the nineteenth century. That Freneau was the most conspicuous pioneer in the dim romantic world that was to be explored by Coleridge and Poe, we have already shown; that he was a pioneer in the movement that succeeded in throwing off the chain forged by Pope is evident to any one who will examine his early work. "The Wild Honey Suckle," for instance, which was written in 1786, twelve years before the "Lyrical Ballads," is as spontaneous and as free from Pope as anything written by Wordsworth. It is a nature lyric written with the eye upon the object, without recollection of other poetry, and it draws from the humble flower a lesson for humanity in the true Wordsworthian manner. Before Freneau, American poetry had been full of the eglantine, the yew, the Babylonian willow, the lark--the flora and fauna of the Hebrew and British bards. In our poet we find, for the first time, the actual life of the American forest and field--the wild pink, the elm, the wild honeysuckle, the pumpkin, the blackbird, the squirrel, the partridge, "the loquacious whip-poor-will," and in addition to this the varied life of the American tropic islands. We find for the first time examples of that true poetic spirit that can find inspiration in humble and even vulgar things; that, furthermore, can draw from lowly nature and her commonplaces deep lessons for human life. Freneau sees the reflection of the stars in the bosom of the river, "But when the tide had ebbed away The scene fantastic with it fled, A bank of mud around me lay And sea-weed on the river's bed,"