FIRST VENTURES. 23 youth. In after years, Phœbe often spoke of the new, keen sensation of delight which she felt when, for the first time, she saw her own verses in print. "O, if they could only look like that now," she said to me within a year of her death; "if they only could look like that now, it would be better than money." She was but fourteen when, without consulting even Alice, she sent a poem in secret to a Boston newspaper, and knew nothing of its acceptance, till to her astonishment she saw it copied in a home (Cincinnati) paper. She laughed and cried over it. "I did not care any more if I were poor, or my clothes plain. Somebody cared enough for my verses to print them, and I was happy. I looked with compassion on my schoolmates. You may know more than I do, I thought, but you can't write verses that are printed in a newspaper; but I kept my joy and triumph to myself." Meanwhile Robert Cary built a new house on the farm, to which he removed with his second wife, leaving Alice and Phoebe, their two brothers, and young sister Elmina, to live together in the old home. By this time newspapers and magazines, with a few new books, including the standard English poets, were added to the cottage library, while several clergymen and other persons of culture coming into the rural neighborhood, brought new society and more congenial associations to the sisters. Alice had begun to publish, and without hope of present reward was sending her verses through the land astray, they chiefly finding shelter in the periodicals and journals of the Universalist Church, with which she was most familiar, and in the daily and weekly journals of Cincinnati. The Boston "Ladies' Repository," the "Ladies' Repository" of Cincinnati, 6 and "Graham's Magazine," were among the leading magazines which accepted and published her earlier verses. Phoebe says: "Alice's first literary adventure appeared in the 'Sentinel' (now 'Star of the West'), published in Cincinnati. It was entitled 'The Child of Sorrow,' and was written in her eighteenth year. The Star,' with the exception of an occasional contribution to some of the dailies of the same city, was for many years her only medium of publication. After the establishing of the National Era' at Washington in 1847, she wrote poetry regularly for its columns, and here she first tried her hand at prose, in a series of stories under a fictitious name. From Dr. Bailey of the Era' she received the first money ever earned by her pen- ten dollars sent as a gratuity, when she had written for him some months. She afterwards made a regular engagement to furnish him with contributions to his paper for a small stipulated sum.' Even now the real note of a natural singer will penetrate through all the noise of our day, and arrest the step and fix the ear of many a pilgrim amid the multitude. This was far more strikingly the fact in 1850-51. Poets, so called, then were not so plenty as now; the congregation of singers so much smaller, any new voice holding in its compass one sweet note was heard and recognized at once. There had come a lull in the national struggles. The tremendous events which have absorbed the emotion and consumed the energies of the nation for the last decade were only just beginning to show their first faint portents. Men of letters were at leisure, and ready to listen to any new voice in literature. Indeed, they were anxious and eager to see take form and substance in this country an American ALICE CARY'S EARLY POETRY. 25 literature which should be acknowledged and honored abroad. Judging by the books of American authors which he has left behind, no one at that time could have been quite so much on the alert for new American poets and poetesses as Dr. Rufus W. Griswold. He generously set amid his "American Female Writnames which perished like morning-glories, after their first outburst of song. He could not fail, then, sweet strains of untu ers to hear with delight those tored music breaking from that valley of the West, heard now across all the land. The ballads and lyrics written by that saucer of lard with its rag flame, in the hours when others slept, were bringing back at last true echoes and sympathetic responses from kindred souls, throbbing out in the great world of which as yet these young singers knew nothing. Alice's "Pictures of Memory" had already been pronounced by Edgar Allan Poe to be one of the most musically perfect lyrics in the English language. The names of Alice and Phoebe Cary in the corners of newspapers and magazines, with the songs which followed, had fixed the attention and won the affection of some of the best minds and hearts in the land. Men of letters, among them John G. Whittier, had written the sisters words of appreciation and encouragement. In 1849, the editor of the "Tribune," Horace Greeley, visited them in their own home, and thus speaks of the interview: "I found them, on my first visit to Cincinnati, early in the summer of 1849; and the afternoon spent in their tidy cottage on 'Walnut Hills,' seven miles out of the city, in the company of congenial spirits, since departed, is among the greenest oases in my recollection of scenes and events long past." In May, 1849, Phœbe writes : "Alice and I have been very busy collecting and revising all our published poems, to send to New York. Rev. R. 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." This little volume, entitled "Poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary," published by Moss and Brother, of Philadelphia, was the first condensed result of their twelve years of study, privation, aspiration, labor, sorrow, and youth. To the year 1850, Alice and Phoebe had never met any of their Eastern friends save Mr. Greeley. But after the publication of their little book, they went forth together to the land of promise, and beheld face to face, for the first time, the sympathetic souls who had sent them so many words of encouragement and praise. They went first to New York, from thence to Boston, and from Boston these women minstrels took their way to Amesbury, and all unknown, save by name, knocked at the door of the poet Whittier. Mr. Whittier has commemorated that visit by his touching poem of "The Singer," published after the death of Alice. Years since (but names to me before), Two song-birds wandering from their nest, A gray old farm-house in the West. Timid and young, the elder had 27 "THE SINGER." Yet, ere the summer eve grew long, Her dark, dilating eyes expressed The broad horizons of the West; Her speech dropped prairie flowers; the gold 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! What could I other than I did? She went with morning from my door; Thenceforth I knew her voice of cheer, Years passed; through all the land her name Her life was earnest work, not play ; Unseen of her, her fair fame grew, |