The Vernal Ague
Where the pheasant roosts at night,
Lonely, drowsy, out of sight,
Where the evening breezes sigh
Solitary, there stray I.
Close along the shaded stream,
Source of many a youthful dream,
Where branchy cedars dim the day,
There I muse, and there I stray.
Yet, what can please amid this bower,
That charmed the eye for many an hour!
The budding leaf is lost to me,
And dead the bloom on every tree.
The winding stream, that glides along,
The lark, that tunes her early song,
The mountain’s brow, the sloping vale,
The murmuring of the western gale,
Have lost their charms!—the blooms are gone!
Trees put a darker aspect on,
The stream disgusts that wanders by,
And every zephyr brings a sigh.
Great guardian of our feeble kind!
Restoring Nature, lend thine aid!
And o’er the features of the mind
Renew those colours, that must fade,
When vernal suns forbear to roll,
And endless winter chills the soul.
This poem is in the public domain.
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.