and from this he draws the obvious moral for human life. Consider what Pope would have said of mud. Indeed, to appreciate Freneau, one must come to him after a careful reading of the classic poets who preceded him. What a shock to this school would have been the vividly realistic poem on "Logtown." Just how much Freneau influenced the school of poets who in England broke away from the trammels of the eighteenth century, we can never know; yet no one can read long in the American poet and not be convinced that his influence was considerable. His poems were known and read freely in England at the very dawn of the critical period in British poetry, and their echoes can be detected more than once. In his use of his native land and his familiar surroundings as a background for art, Freneau discovered the poetical side of the Indian, and thus became the literary father of Brockden Brown, Cooper, and the little school of poets which in the early years of the century fondly believed that the aboriginal American was to be the central figure in the poetry of the new world. To the little real poetry that there is in the Indian, Freneau did full justice, but he went to no such absurd lengths as did Eastburn and Whittier. The "Indian Death Song," if it indeed be his, is full of the wild, stoical heroism of the brave who is dying beneath the torture of his enemies. In "The Indian Student" he has covered fully the Indian's love for the pathless forest, and to the untamable wildness of his nature. "The Dying Indian" and "The Indian Burying-Ground" sum up what is essentially poetic in Indian legend and all that is pathetic in the fate of the vanishing race. Poetry, if it is to confine itself to the truth, can do little more for the Indian. Such was Philip Freneau, a man in every respect worthy to bear the title of "the father of American poetry." He was the first true poet born upon our continent; he realized in his early youth his vocation; he gave himself with vigor and enthusiasm to his calling; he fitted himself by wide reading and classic culture; he received the full inspiration of a great movement in human society; he lifted up his voice to sing, but he was smothered and silenced by his contemporaries. He was all alone; he had about him no circle of "Pleiades" to encourage and assist; he had no traditions, religious or otherwise, that would compel silence. He was out of step with the theology of his generation; he was out of tune with the music of his day; he was beating time a half century ahead of the chorus about him. The people have to be educated to revolution, and America had not yet learned to take the initiative in things intellectual and æsthetic. She must follow the literary fashions beyond the sea. Freneau was for breaking violently away from England and for setting up a new standard of culture and literary art on this side the water.