An American poet; born near Cincinnati, O., April 26, 1820; died in New York city, Feb. 12, 1871. When quite young she commenced writing sketches and poems for the press. In 1852 she, with her sister Phœbe, removed to New York city, where they lived during the rest of their lives. In 1850 the sisters published a volume entitled “Poems by Alice and Phœbe Cary.” Alice soon after published “Clovernook, or Recollections of our Neighborhood in the West” (1851–53); “Hagar, a Story of To-Day” (1852); “Married not Mated” (1856); “The Lover’s Diary” (1867); and “Snow-Berries: A Book for Young Folks” (1869).

Personal

  Miss Cary is simple in her tastes, unostentatious in her style of living, confiding in her disposition, hearty in her appreciation of goodness, charitable in her judgments to a remarkable degree, hopeful in faith, agreeable as a companion, disposed to constant deeds of charity, practicing self-denial as a privilege, and living the life of a pure, truly Christian woman.

  She was buried on Tuesday, amid one of the most violent storms of the winter. It seems sad to leave one we love in such desolation. But the storms cannot disturb her repose. There let her sleep, sweet, gentle spirit, child of nature and of song. The spring will come, and the grass grow green on her grave, and the flowers bloom, emblems of the resurrection unto life everlasting.

  Business interests had brought into her western neighborhood a man at that time much her superior in years, culture, and fortune. Naturally he sought the society of a young, lovely woman so superior to her surroundings and associations. To Alice he was the man of men. It is doubtful if the most richly endowed man of the world whom she met afterwards in her larger sphere, ever wore to her the splendor of manhood which invested this king of her youth. Alice Cary loved this man, and in the profoundest sense she never loved another. A proud and prosperous family brought all their pride and power to bear on a son, to prevent his marrying a girl to them uneducated, rustic, and poor. “I waited for one who never came back,” she said. “Yet I believed he would come, till I read in a paper his marriage to another. Can you think what life would be—loving one, waiting for one who would never come!” He did come at last. His wife had died. Alice was dying. The gray-haired man sat down beside the gray-haired woman. Life had dealt prosperously with him, as is its wont with men. Suffering and death had taken all from her save the lustre of her wondrous eyes. From her wan and wasted face they shone upon him full of tenderness and youth. Thus they met with life behind them—they who parted plighted lovers when life was young. He was the man whom she forgave for her blighted and weary life, with a smile of parting as divine as ever lit the face of woman.

  The sisters were in striking contrast, Phœbe, the younger, was a jocund, hearty, vivacious, witty, merry young woman, short and round; her older sister, Alice, was taller and more slender, with large, dark eyes; she was meditative, thoughtful, pensive, and rather grave in temperament; but the two were most heartily in sympathy in every opinion and in all their literary and social aims.

  Sometimes the Whittiers had guests; and “Lizzie” delighted to tell how their mother was once met at the door by two plump maidens who announced that they had come from Ohio mainly to see her son. She explained that he was in Boston. No matter; they would come in and await his return. But he might be away a week. No matter; they would willingly wait that time for such a pleasure. So in they came. They proved to be Alice and Phœbe Cary, whose earlier poems, which had already preceded them, were filled with dirges and despair; but they were the merriest of housemates, and as the poet luckily returned next day, they stayed as long as they pleased, and were welcome.

  At No. 53 of the next block in Twentieth Street the sisters Cary dwelt many years and wrought the sweetness and purity of their natures into song and story. Their unpretentious little brick dwelling has been but slightly changed since it passed to strangers, and we may still see the pretty, bay-windowed parlor on the right, where for fifteen years were held the delightful Sunday night receptions which drew such spirits as Stoddard, Taylor, Whittier, Ripley, Aldrich, Whipple, Parton, Greeley, Fields, Ole Bull, Justin McCarthy, and others of similar gifts. Phœbe’s study above the parlor, and the room at the left of the passage where Alice wrote her best books and carolled the songs for which she is remembered and loved; here her “Born Thrall” was begun, and here she breathed out her life, relinquishing her work only when, in the weariness of death, the pen literally fell from her hand.

General

  Alice Cary evinces in many poems a genuine imagination and a creative energy that challenges peculiar praise. We have perhaps no other author, so young, in whom the poetical faculty is so largely developed.

  Now conceded to be one of the most eminent writers, in prose and verse, which this country has produced.

  Few American women have written more than Miss Cary, and still fewer have written more successfully. Yet she does not write rapidly nor recklessly, and her works evince conscientious, painstaking effort, rather than transcendent genius or fitful inspiration.

  Her art is not so conspicuous as her poetic insight. Many of her most striking images are rather crudely wrought, and to read her lines smoothly requires such a variety of accents that the sensitive ear is constantly threatened with a shock. Some stanzas are padded to proper dimensions by phrases that we are accustomed to hear from young ladies with limited vocabularies, and which give us a sudden descent to the regions of the commonplace. But her poetic feeling is genuine; her cheerful temper kept her from morbid sentimentalism, the bane of modern poetry; she attempted no flights beyond her powers, and never sought to set out the plan of the universe in the cant words of metaphysics. For these solid excellences many faults of construction are forgiven. Hers poems can be read with hearty enjoyment, and ought to be remembered and esteemed as among the best utterances of American women.

  They were full of the freshness and fragrance of her native fields; full of simple, original, graphic pictures of the country life, and the men and women whom she knew best; full of the exquisite touches of a spontaneous, child-like genius, and they were gathered up as eagerly by the public as the children gather wild flowers. Their very simplicity and freshness won all hearts…. Nothing in her music touches one so nearly as its manifold variations of the hymns of human life—now tender, pathetic, and patient; now grand with resignation and faith, uttered always with a child-like simplicity; telling, most of all, how the human heart can love and suffer, how it can believe and find rest. It was her all-embracing pity, her yearning love for the entire race of Adam, which made her song a personal power, an ever present consolation to thousands of human souls who never measured her by any rule of poetic art.

  Whose individual strain of melancholy melody clings to remembrance, its charm stubbornly outliving our critical recognition of defects due, in great measure, to over-production.

  Much of Alice Cary’s work has the true poetic method of indirectness, especially in “The Gray Swan.” The details of this story are suggested rather than expressed; the gradual revealing of the sailor’s identity, the emotions of the mother, and the character of the sailor are presented with art. In this respect the poem is one of the finest in American literature.

  In Alice’s poems there is always an undertone of sadness, born of her own sorrows. For this she was often criticised, and yet she rose high above it in many of her works. So simple, forceful, direct is she as a ballad writer that she ranks first among those Americans who have produced ballads. Some of her poems, such as “Pictures from Memory” will last as long as the language in which they are written, for they speak to the heart of the people.

  Poe praised Alice Cary’s “Pictures of Memory,” and Phœbe’s “Nearer Home” has become a favorite hymn. There is nothing peculiarly western about the verse of the Cary sisters. It is the poetry of sentiment, memory, and domestic affection, entirely feminine, rather tame and diffuse as a whole, but tender and sweet, cherished by many good women and dear to simple hearts.

  Alice Cary’s poems are colorless and passionless. They have little spontaneity or large creative power. Everywhere in them one finds the hackneyed epithets and phrases, the sing-song rhythm, and the sentimental pictures of the period in which they were written. Their charm consists in their sweet femininity and their rare delicacy and simplicity. With a certain large class of readers these poems have a perennial charm. Perhaps her best claim to remembrance is her “Clovernook,” a series of prose studies of her early Ohio home.

  She lives chiefly by her poems of personal feeling, which at their best are sweetly lyrical, full of bright fancy, beautiful diction, and delicate observation of nature, resembling the verse of Keats and Tennyson. Her ballads and other verses for children, though often moral in intent, are playful. Her religious poems are at once devout and beautiful. Alice Cary’s poetical vein was slender, but it was pure gold.