Cary
ka'ri, Alice and Phoebe, American poets. They were the children of a plain farmer near Cincinnati. Alice was born April 26, 1820; Phoebe, September 4, 1824. They were educated in the district school. Alice was tender and sad; Phoebe, witty and joyous. Their mother died while they were young. They did the housework together and began writing poetry and articles for such magazines as would accept their contributions. Whittier gave them much encouragement. In 1849 a volume of their poems was published. The next year Alice went to New York to live, and sent for Phoebe a few months later. Money began to come in from their writings. Soon they were able to move into a pretty little house where the literary people of the city, including Horace Greeley, a staunch friend, were quite in the habit of dropping in for an evening, or at a weekly reception. Both sisters died in 1871, Alice first, and were buried in Greenwood Cemetery, Brooklyn. In life and in death the sisters were inseparable; their poems are published together in a single volume. Instead of trying to tell the good they did, and instead of giving the names of their chief poems, we take the space for a quotation from each, and a quotation from a poem by Whittier written on the occasion of Alice's death:
Dress the ground and till it;
Turn in the little seed, brown and dry,
Turn out the golden millet.
Work, and your house shall be duly fed;
Work, and rest shall be won;
I hold that a man had better be dead
Than alive, when his work is done.
--Alice Cary, Work.
Comes to me o'er and o'er;
I am nearer home today
Than I ever have been before;
Where the many mansions be;
Nearer the great white throne,
Nearer the crystal sea;
Nearer the bound of life,
Where we lay our burdens down;
Nearer leaving the cross,
Nearer gaining the crown!
--Phoebe Cary, Nearer Home.
The good she did she rarely knew;
Unguessed of her in life, the love
That rained its tears her grave above.
--Whittier, The Singer.