The poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary

Prefatory Note

This volume is made up of material contained in the following original issues : —

Poems of Alice and Phxebe Carey. Moss and Brother, Philadelphia. 1850. 12mo.

Lyra and Other Poems. By Alice Carey. Redfield, Clinton Hall, New York. 1852. 12mo.

Poems and Parodies. By Phoebe Carey. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1854. 12mo.

Poems. By Alice Cary. Boston : Ticknor and Fields. 1855. 12nio.

It will be noticed that the name of the authors was spelled " Carey " in the first three of these volumes, but with the fourth, as in subsequent issues, the "e" was omitted.

The earliest of these books had on its title-page the motto —

" in their delicious clime Mocking the birds with more melodious songs,"

and carried the following " Advertisement " : —

"The publishers but comply with the general desire in issuing this first edition of the collected writings of the ' two sisters of the West/ Alice and Phosbe Carey, whose occasional contributions to the literary journals have within a few years secured for them a rank among the most popular writers of their sex in this country. It is believed that these leaves, gathered into a volume,

IV PREFATORY NOTE.

will more than confirm the favorable judgments awarde to them upon their original and separate appearance."

This paragraph, dated Philadelphia, October, 1849, waj followed by a " Notice of the Authors," taken from Griswold's Female Poets of America.

The poems contributed by Alice Cary to this first vol ume are ninety-one in number. Lyra included seventytwo poems, of which the author retained all but f ourtee: in her collection of 1855. To these she added a Mexican romance in blank verse, amounting to some two thousand lines, and sixty-five new short poems, with twenty-four reprints from the volume of 1850. Alice Cary's poems are placed here in the original order of the volumes of 1850 and 1855. The few poems from Ijyra which were not included in the volume of 1855 are grouped directly before The Maiden of Tlascala.

Phoebe Cary contributed to the initial volume fortyfive poems. Nine of these she reprinted, four years later, in Poems and Parodies, bringing the full count for the volume up to seventy-three. Her poems are given here in the original order. In cases where the sisters used the same poems in successive volumes, this collection holds to the order of their first appearance, although the revised form, as foot-notes point out, is often adopted.

These original texts have been scrupulously reproduced. The punctuation is often at fault and, in other respects, the volumes show signs of careless proof-reading. A copy of the 1850 volume in the Boston Public Library has certain manuscript emendations, which suggest, by their character, an author's corrections. The handwriting is not that of Alice Cary, but shows some resemblance to Phoebe's script, so far as this can be determined from a single signature. These emendations are retained in foot-notes.

Contents

POEMS BY ALICE GARY.

From Volume of 1850.

PAGE

Introduction

Mr. Griswold: I can never sufficiently thank you for the kind interest you take in myself and sister. . . .

We think of visiting the Eastern cities next summer, when I hope for the happiness of seeing you — in the meantime, I shall not fail to exert myself to more fully merit the very nattering opinion you are pleased to express of me.

I am very happy to avail myself of your obliging offer to secure for us a more available disposal of our poems. Any arrangements you may find it convenient to make will be gratefully endorsed by us — but I must protest against your giving yourself any trouble on our account.

We have until quite recently written gratuitously, but are now receiving a trifling remuneration for our correspondence — to give you an idea of its amount, I will state that we write alternately for the National Era every week for two dollars an article ! We have several other engagements on terms a trifle in advance of those stated, and as we are dependent on our poems almost exclusively, it is advisable that we make the best disposal of them.

Be assured that I shall be most happy to number you among my correspondents, and shall gratefully and proudly receive any communication with which you may be pleased to favor me, but business must plead my excuse for so early an intrusion upon yonr notice. It would certainly be a gratification to me to have our poems, or rather a selection from them, issued by one of our Eastern publishers, and if you can dispose of the copyright so as to ensure you a compensation for editing the work, and will consent to edit it, we shall be content to receive whatever more there may be, or if nothing more, to receive nothing. Should you be able to make such arrangements, we will immediately set about the preparation of the volume. We have selected " Woodnotes" as a title — what do you think of it? Any suggestions you may make with reference to the proposed volume will be gratefully received.

I cannot close without again offering my grateful acknowledgments for the kind favor with which you have been pleased to honor me, and expressing the hope you may be speedily restored to perfect health, I am, with sincere regard,

Very truly yours, ^ ^

INTR OD UC TION. xxi

Dear Sir : . . . Well, how could I hope that it would be otherwise? I am but a simple aud uncultured girl, and am perhaps best off in the shadow of my native hills. Again I beg your forgiveness, and promise that I will not listen to my heart again — not in this letter, certainly.

I half envy you the privilege of going abroad. I have sometimes hoped to see something of the great world beside in dreams, but I never shall. You must not, my dear Mr. Griswold, flatter yourself that I look any better than my daguerreotype — it is very correct, the expression not perfectly so, perhaps, as I changed countenance a little during the sitting. I hardly know how to describe myself, and am half inclined to cut from the letter of a friend a description which he tells me he has just been giving Whittier of me, for, strange to say, he has not flattered me. ... I am five feet, two inches in height, not heavy, and not very thin, don't know how much I weigh, have black eyes, and hair darkly brown, am a brunette, and decidedly plain, having seen my twenty-ninth birthday. ... I am sometimes passionately fervent in piety, and sometimes rebellious as the fallen. I love with deepest intensity, but do not hate, those I do not like I am indifferent to. . . . Mr. Whittier kindly proffers his aid and assistance in the getting up of the proposed work — advises me not to be in a hurry, which I shall not be ; strongly recommends Ticknor. . . .

And so you do not like my rhymeless efforts. The two pieces you speak of are in my own opinion among the best things I have written, as also in the opinion of some whose opinion I value highly. I am glad you have told me what you think. I agree with you that lyrical composition is my forte, if I have any, but I am accustomed to let my thought flow as it will. Among literary artists I have no place. Mr. Whittier has just favored me with some very good advice ; I hope I shall profit by it. He extends us a cordial invitation to visit himself and sister at Amesbury, which I hope to be able to accept.

I am sensitive to a painful degree, and have never had a correspondent, save yourself, of whom I could say they have written nothing I could wish unwritten. . . .

You think Phoebe more grave than I. She is less so.

INTRODUCTION.

xxn

Her daguerreotype does not do her justice. Her countenance in conversation is almost mirthful. She has dimples which show themselves constantly, is very sarcastic (though she denies it), and enjoys the reputation of being a wit. She is less [sic] and younger than I. . . .

Ever sincerely yours,

Alice Cary.

The temperament of Phoebe Cary was blithe and sturdy, with a vein of practical good sense. She was still a child when the family afflictions came, and thus suffered no such deep and lasting grief as did the impressionable girl of fifteen. Phoebe, too, had escaped the pangs of love betrayed. Her attitude toward Dan Cupid, indeed, was from the first almost to the last saucy and defiant. She made fun of romance, she derided in verse and in speech the lordly ways of husbands, and she avowed in middle life that she had "never loved any man well enough to lie awake half an hour to be miserable about him." When asked by some impertinent if she had ever been disappointed in her affections, Phoebe replied promptly, "]STo; but a great many of my married friends have." Her epistolary comment at the concluded arrangement for that first volume of poems is characteristic :

" Alice and I have been very busy collecting and revising all our published poems, to send to New York. Rev. E. W. Griswold, quite a noted author, is going to publish them for us this summer, and we are to receive for them a hundred dollars. I don't know as I feel better or worse, as I don't think it will do us much good, or any one else."

Not even Griswold's faith in the Cary sisters carried him to the length of publishing their full count of three hundred and fifty poems. Of the one hundred and thirtysix that he selected, two-thirds were by Alice. About thirty of these are on themes connected with death— pictures of dying-beds, meditations in graveyards, mournin- for the lost, longing to die. The best that can be said lor them is that they are sincere, springing from actual experience of bereavement. The sentiment may be weak : it is not false. "The Orphan Girl," "The Homeless,"

is Alice Cary herself. The lines "To Lucy" directly refer to her little sister of that name. The " Myrrha " elegies commemorate Rhoda. Of the remaining poems, nearly half have to do with the fruitless waiting, the blighted hopes, and broken hearts of maidens abandoned by their lovers. The autobiographic tone is heard through them all, although the circumstances are varied. Sometimes the forsaken girl lives on "through, long weary years " alone ; sometimes

" With a cheek grown thinner, whiter,

And the dark locks put away From a brow of patient beauty,

Dwells the maiden of my lay — Dwells she where the peaceful shadow

Of her native hills is thrown, Binding up the wounds of others

All the better for her own."

Usually, however, the unrewarded watcher droops and dies, and it may chance that the troth-breaker,

"the haughty child of pride — The angel of delusive dreams,"

comes to weep above her deathbed or her burial-mound. Here, too, the writer has dipped the pen in her own heart. The events of her youth had been the death of mother and sisters, the desertion of her worldly minded wooer. How little else had come into that sequestered life the narrow range of this first volume testifies. Religious sensibility is present everywhere, and some half dozen poems are the direct expression of Christian devotion. As many more champion philanthropic and ethical movements of the time. Other themes are drawn from the most striking figures of history, — Hannibal, Cleopatra, Napoleon. A few pseudoromantic ballads of feeble construction, a few personal addresses to friends, two or three songs for children, "Pictures of Memory/' and the first draft of "The Old Homestead " nearly complete the reckoning.

There is something very touching in the intellectual and artistic poverty of the work. The sentences are often ungrammatical, and the vocabulary is sometimes inexact. The Norse king, for example, strides over the lintel, supposing it to be the threshold. The volume is xx i v INTRODUCTION.

a confusion of rhythmic echoes, — of Byron, Bulwer, Mrs. Hemans. "The Two Missionaries" sets one repeating

" By Nebo's lonely mountain."

"Seko" owes its existence to "The Skeleton in Armor." The sentiment and even the diction of Longfellow are sometimes all but appropriated, as in "Visions of Light," "Old Stories," and that stanza of "Eloquence" which tells of

"muffled footsteps In the corridors of crime.' '

The author acknowledges in a footnote her " indebtedness to Coleridge for one or two passages" in "Pitied Love," but there is no such owning up to her close imitation, in " Musings by Three Graves/" of Gray's " Elegy in a Country Churchyard," though she has taken over his stanza, situation, mood, epithets, the very twilight shadow and sombre cadence of his monody. A wavering Shelley note, mingled with a hint of Keats, is manifest in " Two Visions," but the most extraordinary exhibition of innocent plagiarism may be found in the initial poem of the volume. This lament on the death of Keats is a dexterously woven web dyed through and through in the rich colors of the "Adonais" and "Eve of St. Agnes." Here and there the poetic "shreds and patches" are clearly discernible. The ode "To a Skylark" yielded the "embodied joy" and "sunken sun." The opening line of "Hyperion" is altered from

" Deep in the shady sadness of a vale n to

" Deep in the shady cincture of the vale."

" Thanatopsis " gave suggestion, by

" Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste " for

" Along the gray and melancholy air."

The " Ode to a Nightingale " contributed the idea of a cheating Fancy, and "Lycidas" could not well refuse " the eyelids of the morn," since the phrase was already

INTR OB UC TION. xxv

borrowed from the book of Job. The close of the poem is frankly reminiscent of " Alastor " : —

" And Silence, too enamoured of that voice, Locks its mute music in her rugged cell."

But while this lyrical composite betrays the writer's ignorance of literary rights, it reveals the height of her aspiration and the glow of her poetic sympathy. The simpler verses in the collection, however, pleased the rank and file of her readers more. Thei;e were many who prized the pathos of her melodies, and others who enjoyed their true touches of outdoor beauty, so that the publication of the volume secured Alice Cary a certain modest standing as a poet.

Phoebe Gary's literary talent was generally looked upon, from the first, as slighter than her sister's. Her dominant tone is the religious and the ethical. She was in full accord wiih the impetuous reformers of her day, and denounced in rhyme, as roundly as Whittier himself, slavery, the gallows, war. She sang the praises of the cold water army and exhorted the winebibber. Pity for the poor and wretched, for the criminals made by law, and the outcasts of society, rings in her verse with no uncertain sound. Her poems on death are less numerous than her sister's, and, written as several of them were on occasion of the loss of friends, take on a more pronounced character of consolation and of heavenly hope. " The Place of Graves " describes the resting-spot of her mother, Rhoda, and little Lucy. The love sentiment is but a minor interest in Phoebe Cary's poetry, although she had something more akin to dramatic imagination than Alice possessed and could vary her situations more easily. A few of her love lyrics, however, take their color from Alice. The general tone of Phoebe's contribution to this first volume is bracing. She does not dwell on vain regrets nor cherish pathos for its own sake. She has a healthful relish for life, with all its brisk activities. Alice loved to sing of twilight and moonlight. Phoebe praised the early morning. Her grammar and her metaphors are as uncertain as her sister's. Her verses savor more of energetic speech than song. Her diction is generally commonplace, though sometimes rising to dignity. She is more independent of her models xxvi INTRODUCTION.

than Alice, although it startles one to catch the note of Hogg's "Skylark" in a "Song of the Keformed." The occasional echoes of Moore and Hood and TVhittier are less obtrusive.

Upon the publication of this volume, the two sisters, with their precious hundred dollars, took a momentous trip to the East and, in acceptance of a twice-urged invitation, went to see Whittier, somewhat to the scandal of his Quaker women-folk. His account of that brief visit is embodied in his memorial poem for Alice Gary, " The Singer."

Years since (but names to me before), Two sisters sought at eve my door ; Two song-birds wandering from their nest, A gray old farm-house in the West.

How fresh of life the younger one, Half smiles, half tears, like rain in sun ! Her gravest mood could scarce displace The dimples of her nut-brown face.

Wit sparkled on her lips not less For quick and tremulous tenderness ; And, following close her merriest glance, Dreamed through her eyes the heart's romance.

Timid and still, the elder had Even then a smile too sweetly sad ; The crown of pain that all must wear Too early pressed her midnight hair.

Yet ere the summer eve grew long Her modest lips were sweet with song • A memory haunted all her words Of clover-fields and singing birds.

Her dark, dilating eyes expressed

The broad horizons of the West ;

Her speech dropped prairie flowers : the sold

Of harvest wheat about her rolled.

Fore-doomed to song she seemed to me •

I queried not with destiny :

I knew the trial and the need,

Yet, all the more, I said, God'speed !

INTRODUCTION. xxvii

With such encouragement as this, it was easier for Alice Gary to bid farewell to her native meadows and, in the late autumn, take a humble place among the literary workers of New York City. The two elder sisters had married, but the two younger, Phoebe and Elmina, joined her in the spring of 1851. The Ohio nest had lost its song-birds for good and all. In process of time, the old homestead passed from the father to the brothers. There is now no descendant of the family who cares to occupy it, and, in the spring of 1903, it was purchased by a benevolent citizen of Cincinnati to serve as a home for the blind. This was done at the instance of two other devoted Ohio sisters, Georgia and Florence Trader, the elder of whom is herself bereft of sight, — sisters who have already rendered noble service to the blind of Cincinnati. No disposition of Clovernook could be more fitting.

The small flat, up two nights, in an unfashionable quarter of New York, was maintained by the determined pen of Alice Cary. In 1852 she published three volumes. The most successful of these was " Clovernook ; or, Recollections of our Neighborhood in the West." This fresh, candid account, in pleasant prose, of rural Ohio life, took so well that a second series was issued the next year, followed, in 1855, by "Clovernook Children/' addressed to younger readers. In 1859 appeared a fourth volume of the same general tenor, " Pictures of Country Life." Of less fortunate augury was "Hagar: a Story of To-day." The main theme is the history of a simple village maiden forsaken by her plighted lover, an elegant young clergyman, who, haunted by remorse, ultimately goes mad. The treatment is uneven, the structure weak, the effect melodramatic. With characteristic resolution, Alice Cary kept on to the end of her life, trying to write prose fiction. Her short stories, printed by the leading magazines and journals, were better than her novels, which invariably lack unity and human truth. The amiable characters die lingering deaths ; the tyrants, slovens, and hypocrites are overdone. The plots are ill proportioned and incoherent, the style uneven, the tone depressing.

The third venture of 1852 was a second volume of poems, "Lyra." This already showed advance in firmness and grace of workmanship. The author had evixxviii INTRODUCTION.

dently been pouring over pastoral elegies, Elizabethan as well as Georgian, with the result that the more elaborate odes of the book confuse the reader by their throng of echoes. The Cary sisters were, in the finer sense of the term, spiritualists, and certainly this volume is a haunted house murmurous with poet ghosts, — Spenser, Marlowe, Jonson, Fletcher, Milton, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. Yet through all the literary phraseology of shepherds and reeds, flocks and folds, Endymion, Proteus, Thisbe, Xereides, shine out vivid glimpses of genuine Ohio fields and woods. Artificial as these longer poems are, they witness to a higher poetic sense in Alice Cary than is usually attributed to her. They reveal her quest for a finer artistic beauty than the hard pen-driven conditions of her daily life ever allowed her to attain. In the shorter lyrics and the ballads, as well as in these ostentatious elegies, the old melancholy persists. She longs for the rest of the grave, portrays scenes of death and burial, and never tires of telling the tale of unrequited love. Jessie Carrol watches in vain

"From the Valley of the West "

for the faithless Allan Archer, the dying Madela calls on a lover who does not come, Agatha pines away for a recreant Harold.

The volume which Alice Cary published in 1855 was substantially a collection of the poems of her youth. Twenty-four were garnered from that eventful first book, and fifty-eight from " Lyra." The new poems are sixtysix m number, the last being an ambitious blank-verse romance of about two thousand lines, based on an episode m Prescott's "Conquest of Mexico." But not the far-off Golden Age of Tezcuco, not those strange Aztec names which, the author naively confesses, she has not in every case known how to pronounce, could divert her from her one and only theme. The maiden of Tlascala is wooed, won and forsaken by the proud Hualco, with the anticipated results of her pitiful death and his unavailing remorse. &

t ( ;M 1 ! h rr htl iVJw er , StateS in her § rateM dedication to Mr Grawold that she "could never learn to blot or to revise," many of the poems reprinted in 1855, especially

INTR OB UC TION. xxix

the odes from " Lyra," had been worked over, shortened, and much altered in detail. The new poems show a new influence, that of Mrs. Browning, and still strive to follow in the footprints of Keats, but, taken as a whole, they suggest development toward simplicity and individuality — a development attested by the later work. Although continually contributing verse to the periodicals, it was not until 1866 that Alice Cary published another volume of poems, " Ballads, Lyrics, and Hymns." Two years later came "A Lover's Diary," called out by the death of the youngest sister, Elmina, whose invalid life had found shelter in the pretty home on Twentieth street, bought and furnished by unflagging literary toil. This home, with its informal Sunday evening receptions, had become a social centre for many of the choicest men and women of New York. Sought out by delightful friends, surrounded by the opportunities of a great city, here the sisters lived a quiet, industrious life. They would rise before five in their country-bred fashion, and ply their pens all day as diligently as if these had been knitting-needles, save as Alice snatched a little time for the housekeeping, and Phoebe, more willingly, for the sewing. The elder sister, on whom the main burden had always rested, endured this strenuous pace for but a score of years. After months of illness she died, on February 12, 1871. Her funeral was almost like a triumph, so great and so distinguished was the concourse gathered in honor of the gentle singer of Clovernook. Nor should it be forgotten that, like one of her own heroines, she had sent from her dying-bed for the false lover of her youth, who, a gray-haired, prosperous widower, came at the summons to receive her full forgiveness.

Phoebe's list of publications is short beside that of her more resolute sister. Her second volume of verse, " Poems and Parodies," came out in 1854. The parodies, with little redeeming salt of wit, must plead guilty to the sin of poetic irreverence. Byron, Moore, Willis, Mrs. Hemans, Bayard Taylor — personal friend though he was — are perhaps fair game, but toward such lyrical genius as that of Poe's "Annabel Lee," such sacred sorrow as that of Bryant's " The Future Life," of Wordsworth's "Lucy," and James Aldrich's "A Death-bed," toward Shakespeare, flippancy is all but profane. The

INTRODUCTION.

worthier half of the volume includes a few poems m mem teasing vein, but the book opens rather ominously with' a succession of thirteen dirges. The fervor of re- 1 c-ious feeling, so notable in Phoebe Gary's first volume, finds keener expression in this. "Nearer Home," though us thought would seem to be peculiarly obvious, struck to the popular heart.

Phoebe Cary published but one more volume of original writing, "Poems of Faith, Hope, and Love," in 1868. Meanwhile, although by no means as indefatigable as Alice, she kept herself busy with literary work of a miscellaneous sort. She wrote short stories for the periodicals, and articles to order. With Alice she edited "The

| .hine Gallery " and " From Year to Year." She compiled, with her friend and pastor, Dr. Deems, "Hymns for all Christians." Her mirth and fun made her the life of the home on Twentieth street. One of her pet cronies was the ingenious Mr. Barnum, who enjoyed her piquant comments when personally conducted through "the greatest show on earth." It was she who sug-

'1, in reference to the marriage of the skeleton man and the fat woman, that they must have "loved through thick and thin." AYell content with life as she found it, she had no sentimental concern about her state of spinsterhood, and laughed away all w r ooers until, when already entered into the vale of the forties, she sacrificed a new affection to the old. She dismissed an acceptable suitor rather than leave Alice, whose strength was then perceptibly on the wane.

The sisters, despite all temperamental differences, had held closely together through life, and in their deaths they were not divided. The younger did not survive the elder for six months. On the closing day of July Phoebe ( Jary died, and was laid beside Alice in Greenwood. Death and burial, which had borne so large a share in the poetic sentiment of both, were theirs at last. Posthumous volumes of their poems, for adults and for children, were

d under the editorship of their friend Mrs. Mary

imer Ames, who was also to become their biographer. Her intimate account bespeaks all honor for the women, while, as poets, they stand for a good and gracious influence in their generation and a fragrant memory down the years.

KATHARINE LEE BATES.

ALICE CARY