PHOEBE CARY THE WRITER.

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CHAPTER IX.

PHOEBE CARY.

No singer was ever more thoroughly identified with her own songs than Phoebe Cary. With but few exceptions, they distilled the deepest and sweetest music of her soul. They uttered, besides, the cheerful philosophy which life had taught her, and the sunny faith which lifted her out of the dark region of doubt and ear, to rest forever in the loving kindness of her Heavenly Father. There were few things that she ever wrote for which she cared more personally than for her "Woman's Conclusions." The thought and the regret came to her sometimes, as they do to most of us, that in the utmost sense her life was incomplete — unfulfilled. Often and long she pondered on this phase of existence; and her "Woman's Conclusions," copied below, were in reality her final conclusions concerning that problem of human fate which has baffled so many.

A WOMAN'S CONCLUSIONS.

I said, if I might go back again

To the very hour and place of my birth;

Might have my life whatever I chose,

And live it in any part of the earth;

Put perfect sunshine into my sky,

Banish the shadow of sorrow and doubt; Have all my happiness multiplied,

And all my suffering stricken out;

If I could have known, in the years now gone, The best that a woman comes to know ; Could have had whatever will make her blest, Or whatever she thinks will make her so;

Have found the highest and purest bliss

That the bridal-wreath and ring inclose; And gained the one out of all the world, That my heart as well as my reason chose;

And if this had been, and I stood to-night

By my children, lying asleep in their beds, And could count in my prayers, for a rosary, The shining row of their golden heads;

Yea! I said, if a miracle such as this

Could be wrought for me, at my bidding, still I would choose to have my past as it is, And to let my future come as it will!

I would not make the path I have trod

More pleasant or even, more straight or wide; Nor change my course the breadth of a hair, This way or that way, to either side.

My past is mine, and I take it all;

Its weakness its folly, if you please;

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Nay, even my sins, if you come to that,

May have been my helps, not hindrances !

A WOMAN'S CONCLUSIONS.”

If I saved my body from the flames

Because that once I had burned my hand :

Or kept myself from a greater sin

By doing a less-you will understand;

It was better I suffered a little pain,

Better I sinned for a little time,

If the smarting warned me back from death,
And the sting of sin withheld from crime.

Who knows its strength, by trial, will know
What strength must be set against a sin;
And how temptation is overcome

He has learned, who has felt its power within!

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And who knows how a life at the last may show? Why, look at the moon from where we stand! Opaque, uneven, you say; yet it shines,

A luminous sphere, complete and grand.

So let my past stand, just as it stands,
And let me now, as I may, grow old;
I am what I am, and my life for me
İs the best

or it had not been, I hold.

The guarded castle, the lady in her bower, the tumbling sea, the shipwrecked mariner, were as real to Alice as to herself when she yielded to the luxury of ballad singing. But in Phoebe the imaginative faculty was less prevailing; it rose to flood-tide only at intervals. The dual nature which she inherited from her father and mother were not interfused, as in Alice, but distinct and keenly defined. Through one nature,

Phoebe Cary was the most literal of human beings.
Never did there live such a disenchanter. Hold up to
her, in her literal, every-day mood, your most precious
dream, and in an instant, by. a single rapier of a sen-
tence, she would thrust it through, and strip it of the last
vestige of glamour, and you would see nothing before
you
but a cold, staring fact, ridiculous or dismal. It
was this tenacious grip on reality, this keen sense of
the ludicrous in the relation between words and things,
which made her the most spontaneous of punsters,
and a very queen of parodists. Her parodies are un-
surpassed. An example of this literal faculty by
which she could instantaneously transmute a spiritual
emotion into a material fact, is found in a verse from
her parody on Longfellow's beautiful lyric:-

"I see the lights of the village

Gleam through the rain and mist,
And a feeling of sadness comes o'er me,

That my soul cannot resist ;

A feeling of sadness and longing

That is not akin to pain,

And resembles sorrow only

As the mist resembles rain."

Phoebe preserves all the sadness and tenderness of the original, while she transfers it without effort from the psychological yearning of the'soul, into the region of physical necessity, from heart-longing to stomachlonging, in the travesty :

"I see the lights of the baker

Gleam through the rain and mist,

And a feeling of something comes o'er me,
That my steps cannot resist ;