On Retirement
(By Hezekiah Salem)
A hermit’s house beside a stream,
With forests planted round,
Whatever it to you may seem
More real happiness I deem
Than if I were a monarch crown’d.
A cottage I could call my own,
Remote from domes of care;
A little garden walled with stone,
The wall with ivy overgrown,
A limpid fountain near,
Would more substantial joys afford,
More real bliss impart
Than all the wealth that misers hoard,
Than vanquish’d worlds, or worlds restored—
Mere cankers of the heart!
Vain, foolish man! how vast thy pride,
How little can your wants supply!—
’Tis surely wrong to grasp so wide—
You act as if you only had
To vanquish—not to die!
This poem is in the public domain.
The title in the edition of 1786 was “Retirement.” In 1795 it was changed to “The Wish of Diogenes.”
Philip Freneau
Born in New York City and raised in Monmouth Country, New Jersey, Philip Morin Freneau graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton) in 1771; at the college commencement, his friend Hugh Henry Breckenridge read The Rising Glory of America, a poem on which the two had collaborated. While working for a short time as a schoolteacher in Long Island, Freneau published anti-British satirical verses. He spent two years as secretary to a planter on St. Croix.