The Poetic Courtship of Philip Freneau, the Poet of the Revolution, and Beautiful Eleanor Forman
OVER a hundred years ago, in the most luxuriant part of Monmouth County, a garden spot of New Jersey, two large white houses smiled at each other through the changing seasons across a long vista of billowing field. The one nearest the sea was Mount Pleasant Hall, the home of the Freneaus, and the other, on the outskirts of Freehold, was Forman Place, the home of the Formans. Tall trees lined the narrow roads that crept so lovingly about them, grain and fruit grew in abundance on their broad acres, and flowers filled the gardens. Surely it was an ideal setting for a poetic courtship.
In the history of American belles-lettres it would be hard to find a more interesting couple than Philip Freneau, the poet of the Revolution, and the Jersey beauty he made his bride. Their life was the sweetest of pastorals. Like two brilliant butterflies, they flitted through years softly tinctured with shadows. When the world ill-used them, they sought refuge at the Pierian spring. Calliope was their sure consoler, and it was only when their gay wings were crushed and broken at the last that they forgot her.
Both belonged to distinguished families counted among the gentry class of the time. The Freneaus were descended from the Huguenot house of De Fresneau, famous in the history of La Rochelle. André Freneau, the poet's grandfather, upon his arrival in New York identified himself with the Royal West India Company of France. His associates in its interest were Auguste Jay and Étienne Delancey, two men of prominence in the early city. He is several times mentioned in the Journal of John Fontaine, who visited New York in 1716. His son, Pierre Freneau, resided in one of the finest dwellings on old Frankfort Street, and there his wife held a miniature court for the French society that found its way to the Dutch city flourishing under the English flag.
The Formans came from as notable stock as the Freneaus. One of their ancestors was a Lord Mayor of London, and Lady Mary Forman is recorded as dazzling New Orleans with her finery at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Tradition says that Mrs. Samuel Forman, a jolly dame and a leader of the old Monmouth neighborhood, used to ride to the Tennent Church in a golden coach. It was at that old church, close by the battle-field of Monmouth, that Philip Freneau first saw his Nelly and grew to love her.
Little Tennent has borne the marks of time lightly since the youth and the maiden shyly gazed at each other across the narrow aisle. Very sweetly her voice would ring out to the gay-tuned airs, for the music was lively in Tennent after that good nomadic dominie, George Whitefield, introduced the fashion of theatrical music in church. It was an often-repeated county jest in Monmouth that no one could fall asleep in the Tennent Church, the pews were so hard and straight-backed, and the choir so noisy.
Eleanor Forman was of a type which has always appealed to the poets. Her features were regular, her eyes blue and languishing, and her hair the color of pale sunshine. So fair and lasting was her complexion that, as an old lady, a Freehold gallant compared it to "the lilies and garden pinks." In those long-dead Sabbaths Freneau and his boy friends, home on vacations from the College of New Jersey, no doubt thought her a very attractive picture as she nestled by her mother's rich beflowered brocade, a tiny figure in white muslin and soft ribbons. James Madison saw her then, and, although she was too young for his companionship, he never forgot her charm, and in after-years, when she had entered the poet's life, he was one of the most loyal frequenters of her little salon in Philadelphia during Washington's second administration.
Although Philip Freneau, as an elderly gentleman given to reminiscence, used to relate that Eleanor Forman crept into his heart in his boyhood before he became a wandering pedagogue, it was not until long after his arrival at manhood's estate that she stormed and took the citadel. There was another romance in his life before his Nelly. At the immature age of sixteen he fell in love with a Jersey maiden residing near his home, whose name is lost to posterity. She died early of consumption, and the poet's verses at the time show his melancholy state of mind.
In "The Power of Fancy" he wrote of her:
Another of his poems, entitled "Amanda in a Consumption," tells the whole pitiful story of his misplaced passion. We sympathize with a lover who was no more than a boy when we read:
There is an old saying that "love weeping burns away," and soon the boy ceased to write lamentations over his lost Belinda. Events were crowding thick and fast into his life at this time; years of travel and excitement had helped him to forget her; and when he returned to "the old house at Monmouth" on a summer day in 1780, weary of war and ill from long incarceration in a British prison-ship, he was in a state of mind to fall in love with the little Nelly of old Tennent days.
Like Philip Freneau, who had written from his earliest childhood, Eleanor Forman began the indulgence of her muse in her teens. One of her books still in existence shows her first thoughts put into verse. "Lines to a Lady's Singing-Bird" are scribbled over a copper print of a placid shepherdess, and words ready for rhyming embellish some of the margins. The pompous Mrs. Forman was very proud of her daughter's accomplishment, and it is said that, on Eleanor's composing some tributary verses to her mother's pet gray turkey, she presented her with a pair of paste shoe-buckles whose glitter affected the heart of every Monmouth maid and swain.
Beside Freneau's own stream running through the valley of young pine-trees near the Hall the romantic Eleanor loved to come to dream. There one day she found another dreamer, and the chance meeting was the beginning of one of the most poetic love-affairs.
This pleasant stream was almost a human thing to the poet. In the days before he found his Eleanor seated on its bank he addressed to it his last musings on the vanished Belinda:
Later, with "the fairest of women" by his side, when Belinda had grown to be only a memory, he composed his exquisite poem, "Retirement:"
Reading its faded original, we hear the strong, mellifluous voice of the poet that the ladies of Charleston used to grow enthusiastic over when he visited his brother Peter in that city, and our minds grow retrospective, leading us back through the years to the couple by the little silver thread of water which long ago gave up its life to some mysterious unknown ocean. What a joyous thing it is when she is near him to listen to his words and share in his flights of fancy! The wind whispers through the pine-trees, and their soft sighing mingles with the gurgling cadences of the wavelets and breaks up the sunlit silence. The wind is a dream wind, and brings to them both sweet visions of the future. The house, surrounded by walls "with ivy overgrown" and "remote from domes of care," where he longs to take her, is almost a reality. Fate is a hag old and blind, and Life is a song from a charmed lute.
Soon after his meeting with Nelly Forman, Freneau wrote his tragedy of "Major André," which was never presented before the footlights. It is not known whether he ever gave it to a printer, and only fragments of his manuscript are in existence to-day. A portion of it shows us the unfortunate André pleading for his life before a tribunal, and as we finger the time-stained paper, desecrated by the household accounts of later years, a tearful Eleanor rises up before us, listening to the impassioned reading of her poetic lover.
For his "Major André" Freneau wrote a prologue, which he afterwards changed and permitted to be spoken at the opening of the Philadelphia Theatre. This he dedicated "to his Excellency General Washington."
"PROLOGUE
"Written to a Theatrical Entertainment in Philadelphia, December, 1781.
In the soft autumn twilights of the days that followed, when the yellow Morris turnpike grew vague and shadowy and the stars dotted the sky like little candles lighting up a hundred pieces of rose- and dusk-tinted velvet, Freneau would mount his faithful Cato and ride through the avenue of locust-trees into the lane leading to Forman Place. Dear to their hearts were these trysts of the lovers. There were walks in the Forman garden, made a place of enchantment by the breath of Indian summer. Later came songs in Madam Forman's chintz parlor. All through their lives Nelly sang to her Philip the love-ditties of sighing Darbys and unhappy Joans; and even after his death, when very aged, it is said that she sometimes crooned to his spirit in a queer cracked voice the songs he once loved to hear.
Forman Place, still standing close to the village of Freehold, what a place of memories it is! The tired, weather-beaten old building which the sunshine seems to desecrate was once one of the happiest of homes. Now, like some sleepy antique dame belated after a revelry, it waits despairingly by the turn of the road for Father Time and his band of winds to sweep it away. Broad-shouldered and broad-hearted Samuel Forman, with a rubicund visage made familiar by Hogarth, was an ideal host. Oh, the Merry-Andrews and the witlings Euphrosyne brought there! "Better one's house be too little one day than too big all the year after" was his motto, and bantering bucks were broadcast round his board.
And Madam Forman, who came of a pious family, but was married at fifteen, early caught the infection from her spouse. None could resist the laugh of the portly dame so redolent of good-humor. Tongues that wagged said her handmaidens were willing to work their fingers off in her service if she would let them. Her daughters she cajoled into the idea that they were wits as well as beauties, and men, from callow youth down to the very grandfathers of the parish, worshipped the ground she tripped upon. Whether gracing her chintz parlor, garbed in a lustrous grenadine, her powdered hair covered with a hundred ringlets that dangled and danced as she talked, or in humble linsey-woolsey overseeing the daily baking, the chance guest was always sure of a welcome from the mistress of Forman Place.
"Heigh-ho! there's Jeremy, Juniper, or Tobias. What a lark!" the great voice of her lord and master would come floating over the staircase or from the depths of the cushioned grandfather's chair in the library. "Yes, he's here, Samuel, and promised to sup," the echo would answer. It was to this happy haven the horseman rode very often after the meeting by the stream.
The days drifted into months and the months into years, and the drama of the Revolution was nearing its triumphant end for the patriot. Monmouth was awakening as from a lethargy. After the ravages it had endured through the early periods of the war, life had become stagnant. At Mount Pleasant Hall Freneau had written many a stirring verse which had travelled from Concord to Yorktown, encouraging the ofttimes despairing soldiers. Not a memorable incident escaped his watchful eye. Behind the ardent and passionate desire for liberty was the inspiration of love to guide his pen. The love of country and the love of woman were intertwined, and it was his thrilling visions of the first that brought sweet dreams of the other real one to camp-fire and battle-field. Liberty was a strange and beautiful goddess that those tattered, wearied men knew not, and it was always the memory of the sweetheart's face that spurred them over rock-bound roads filled with multitudinous obstacles in quest of the shadowy creature. When they fell by the wayside or in the trenches, the look of peace on their white faces was not her doing, but the tender vows and the last kisses of the girls they had left behind them.
Soon came peace, and on its trail the last meeting of the lovers in the Forman garden. The gates of winter were open and all the gorgeous flower-children slumbering in the earth. By the golden sundial a solitary purple pansy bloomed, hoping that the false shimmer was the sun, and in Madam Forman's rose-bed yellow blushmaids were glowing at the bleak landscape like incense lamps on some dim altar. There had been a family conference in Forman Place the night before. Eleanor's brother David, the stern "Black David" of Germantown fame, who had recently laid down his gun and sabre by his father's hearth, was incensed at his sister's betrothal to the poet. Mrs. Freneau's fortune was almost depleted by the inroads of the war. "That scribbling fellow is no match for Eleanor," the warrior said. The household, seated about the heavy oaken table in the hall where the letters and the last Gazette always lay, listened to his words of wisdom. Every one was always silent when David spoke, for his sentences were like nails,—something to be driven into the hearts of his hearers. No one could dispute him. "The Freneaus no longer kept up the state they flourished during their first years in Monmouth; a poet's pen could not support a wife! The engagement was worse than foolhardy. Many a man of wealth as well as parts would be seeking Eleanor."
Samuel, in the great Hepplewaite chair, was silent. The mirth lines about his mouth drooped and lengthened. He liked Freneau, whose ready tongue always held a jest. His blue-eyed Nelly loved him, he knew. Furtively he turned and stole a glance at his wife for help to stem the wrath of the stern dictator, but the good dame held a handkerchief to her eyes. Trouble weighed heavily on her heart. Eleanor stood by the door gazing out of the blurred panes at the road that led to the Freneaus. Her face was pale, but suffused with the light of love. Before her was the highway of Fate, and her heart told her that it would not admit of another.
"David," she said, looking at him, "you may be a great man in war counsel, but when a woman is the question you know naught. With the man I love I could wander penniless but unwearied all through life."
There was silence; then Madam Forman tried to speak, but her voice was choked with sobs.
And so it was that the lovers met in the dying garden and said good-by. She told him of her brother's words, and into his life there came a new desire. His country needed his pen no longer. The fortune his father's will gave to his mother had been placed on the altar of patriotism, and much of it went into the ship "Aurora," captured by the British. He would leave his home to seek another fortune, and, when it was won, return and claim her.
The air was sultry and the moon hung like a dying taper over their heads. The fields that crept up to the Homdel hills he loved so well were gray. A north wind sighed among the wraiths of summer in the garden, a harbinger that the dawn would be fresh and clear.
"I shall never marry any one else," she told him. "My window faces the bend of the road, and there I shall place a candle every night to light your steps when they bring you back to me. Often I shall go to the little stream and wonder where you are wandering. Never fear. I shall wait for you forever and forever, until my cheeks fade and my eyes grow dim."
Like one of the flowers in the garden trying to hide its head from the death-stings of the wind, she nestled in his arms. The moon grew faint behind the clouds, and the soughing low and melodious, for a woman's heart was being spilled over the highway.
The next morning a small procession left Mount Pleasant Hall and crept over the Morris turnpike road to the Point. There were the poet and his mother in the antiquated chaise, Josiah, an old negro household slave, mounted on Cato, and several of the field servants, carrying a large wooden chest, following on foot. The air was fresh and strong, and, although the day was young, the blue of the sky deep and pure. John Burrowes's sailing-vessel was to leave Kearny Port, bound for Philadelphia, before the noon hour.
The sunshine played over the yellow, clay-stained road, and off in the distance the sea was a sheet of burnished gold. Some place where its arms spread was the promised land the poet hoped to find. There his work would bring him a reward that would help him to win his love.
At the Port the vessel was anchored in the calm inlet with her bowsprit pointed to the dancing waves beyond. Old Mrs. Burrowes, the corn merchant's wife, with some of her grandchildren, was on the wharf to see him off. When she saw the Freneau chaise, she ran forward to meet its occupants. "Yes, I am very sure my husband can take Mr. Freneau to Philadelphia," she said, in answer to their inquiries. Mrs. Freneau alighted and sat with her on one of the grain sacks while the poet went to seek Mr. Burrowes. All about them was bustle and confusion preparatory to a long cruise. Soon came the hour of leaving and the last farewells. Tears filled the mother's eyes as she kissed her son. Once before she had watched him depart to wrestle with the world beyond her quiet land. No cruel war was to claim him now, and yet she could not hide her anguish at parting. His own heart was full of courage and the breath of the sea was like wine to him. The fortune his mother had given to her country he would build again! As he embraced his mother, before his eyes was the face of the woman he thought the most beautiful in the world. She was worth the price of conquest.
After Philip left, Eleanor took to watching the highway. It had brought him to her, and in the dawn, the noonday, and the dusk she looked out upon it from the windows of her room, longing for his return. Every night she placed the candle in the farthest sill, as she promised him at parting. He was constantly in her thoughts. As time went on other suitors came to Forman Place to pay to her their addresses. Hezekiah Stout, the great mill-owner of Englishtown, was one of them. That Revolutionary Crœsus received more encouragement from David than from the lady of his choice. Hezekiah proved a patient lover, for when she refused to see him, he would sit silently blinking on the Forman settle for hours at a time, until Madam Forman, the best-natured woman in the world, vowed to herself that, with all his money, he was too stupid a man to wed her daughter.
And the little silver stream that whispered its secrets to the slim pine-trees, how it missed the pair! Many a time it wearily watched the winter wane and earth cast off her white mantle. The wild anemones came, the primroses and the crocuses and all that lovely company of fragile blooms which mark the footsteps of hope. "Oh, if he would but come now while I mirror so much beauty," the stream crooned to herself. Sometimes she would see among the flowers the reflection of the fair face he loved. Then the little stream was happy. "She at least remembers, and perhaps he will come soon," she sang in joy to the pine-trees. Then the grasses grew high, and the golden sunshine lured the dragon-flies to flit among the fragrant worlds along her course. Still he came not. She began to grow impatient. Perhaps her heart would be dried up before his children strolled by her side and waded in her clear water. The leaves began to fall, and the worlds along her course knew that the night was coming on. "He has forgotten," the stream moaned; "forgotten." And, hundreds of miles away, he heard her voice, and in the hold of an ice-bound ship wrote to his stream and his love, whom he called Cynthia, these tender verses:
Mammon proved a cruel and elusive mistress to Freneau, and she led him many a fruitless errand in pursuit of her. For several years he commanded the brig "Washington," owned by his brother Peter. In this ship he made many journeys to the West Indies, and by clever trading at last succeeded in amassing a small competence. With this he returned to Mount Pleasant Hall after an absence of nearly six years.
In the spring of that year the lovers were united. The wedding held in Forman Place was a very simple affair, attended by only a few of the Monmouth neighborhood. After his marriage the poet took his bride home to Mount Pleasant Hall, and later to Philadelphia, where Mrs. Freneau's little salon played a part in the history of the capital. A diary of Freneau's life in that city is said to be in existence, and it is to be hoped that it will some day come to light.
The love-letters of the charming Freneaus, written for the most part in verse, were destroyed many years ago. Several of the poems compiled in the editions of Freneau's works are thought to have been written by his wife. Like Mrs. Wordsworth, who is credited with helping her husband with his masterpiece, "The Daffodils," Mrs. Freneau lent her deft hand to beautifying "The Wild Honeysuckle," the most exquisite poem written by an American in the eighteenth century.
One cannot read these verses without entering into a closer intimacy with "The Poet of the Revolution" and the beautiful Eleanor Forman. Their courtship was idyllic, and during the long stretch of years they walked together hand in hand the flame of love never diminished, but grew brighter. From the day of their marriage, when Freneau is recorded as having compared his blushing bride to Fielding's "Amelia," the ideal characterization of womanhood, until one wintry dawn forty-five years later, when a trembling, aged Eleanor bent over the lifeless body of her lover lulled to sleep in a snow-drift, no discordant note entered the sweet harmony of their lives. When shadows dimmed their pathway, they clung closer to each other. Even death could not separate them. When Freneau was under the sod and the world disputing over the few poor bay leaves it had allowed him, her mind was constantly with the lover of her youth. In her maidenhood she had watched weary years for him to come back to her, and at the last, when his voice was hushed in "the land of no returning," she longed to go to him.