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exquisite rhythm and phrase the soul of nature and of human life; live in the heart of the future when we who criticised it, or passed it by, are dead and forgotten.

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CHAPTER VII.

ALICE'S LAST SUMMER.

We have many proofs that a life devoted to letters is favorable to longevity in women. With all the anxiety and care of following literature as a profession, with all the toil of obtaining a livelihood by it, they have as a rule lived to venerable years. A passionate yearning for continued human existence was a ruling characteristic of Alice Cary to her last conscious hour. She had inherited a constitutional tendency from her mother, which was unfavorable to robust health or to long life. Yet with different habits of work and of life, established early and persistently pursued, even she might have won the longed-for lease of life, and have added another to the list of venerable names, whom we delight to venerate among women of letters. Truly, some proof of this is to be found in the fact that her brothers, sons. of the same mother, who have spent their lives on and near the old homestead farm in active, out-door, farmer life, are to-day strong, healthy, and robust men.

Alice and Phoebe could not have been farmers, but in their twenty years of life in the city they could have followed, nearer than they did, the out-of-doors habits of their old country home. These barefooted rovers in country lanes, who grow up fostered by sun

shine, air, and sky, the intimate friends of bees and birds, of horses and cows, of the cunning workers of the ground and the murmuring nations of the summer air ; these lovers of common flowers with common names ; these rural queens who reigned supreme in their own kingdom, whose richest revenue to the day of their death was drawn from the wealth of nature left so far behind, in the full flower of their womanhood came to the great city, and began a new life, which the vitality of the old enabled them to endure for twenty years, but which drew constantly on their vital springs, without adding one drop to the sources of physical health. To attain the highest success which they sought, they needed both the attrition and opportunities of the city. Had they added to this new life, for a third of every year, their old pastimes and old pursuits, they might have added years to their existence. But no human being, city bred, much less one country born, could have maintained the highest health or have prolonged existence in the hot air, with the sedentary habits, which made the daily life of Alice and Phoebe Cary for many years. The new life encroached upon the old vitality imperceptibly, and not until the very last year of their lives was either of them conscious. of the fatal harm it had wrought. They exchanged the country habits and the familiar out-of-door haunts of the old farm for the roar of streets and the confining air of a city house. Moreover, modest as this house was, it took much money to support it in such a place. This was all to be earned by the pen, and for many years it was earned almost exclusively by Alice. With her natural independence, her fear of financial obligation, her hatred of debt, her desire for a com

petency, her generous hospitality, it is easy to see how heavy was the yoke of work which she wore. Dear soul! she might have made it lighter, could she have believed it. As it was, even to the last she was never free from its weight. There came a time when her personal life was work, work, work. Then there was the shadow of death always on the house. Elmina, the youngest darling of all, was fading day by day from before their eyes. Her outgoings were infrequent and uncertain. The leisure moments of Alice and Phoebe were spent with her in her room. As she slowly faded, her sisters became more exclusively devoted to her. At last it came to pass that Alice rarely left the house except on some errand of necessity.

After Elmina's death, as the summers came round, she became more and more loth to leave her city home to go any where into the country. Not that her heart had let go of its old love of natural beauty, but because she came to dread journeys and the annoyance and inconvenience of travelling. What had been a necessity at times, during Elmina's life, remained a habit after her death. By this time Alice had herself merged into the invalid of the family. The crisis had come when nature demanded change, recreation, and rest. She turned her back on all. When her friends were away, scattered among the hills and by the sea, Alice, left alone behind her closed blinds, was working harder and more continuously than ever.

The stifling summers waxed and waned, the thermometer would rise and glare at 100°, cars and stages would rattle beneath her windows, but through all the fiery heat, through all the wearing thunder of the

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streets, the tireless brain held on its fearful tension, and would not let go. Phoebe would spend a month in the country, and return with sea-weeds and mountain mosses and glowing cheeks and eyes, as trophies ; but not so would Alice. Not that she never left the city. She did sometimes, for a few days, but it was in a brief, protesting way, that had neither time nor chance to work her help or cure. As the sedentary

habits of her life increased, and the circulation of her blood lowered, she had recourse more and more to artificial heat, till at last she and Phoebe lived in a temperature which in itself was enough to make health impossible. In the relaxed condition inevitably produced by this furnace atmosphere, they were sometimes compelled to go into the out-door air, and more than one acute attack of sickness was the result to both sisters.

These years of protracted labor, unbroken by recreation, unblessed by the resuscitating touch of nature's healing hand, brought to Alice, shy and shrinking from birth, greater shrinking, keener suffering, and a more abiding loneliness. She was never selfishly isolated. There was never a moment in her life when tears did not spring to her eyes, and help from her hand at the sight of suffering in any living thing. She would go half-way to meet any true soul. She never failed in faith or devotion to her friends. No less as the years went on, she felt interiorly more and more alone; she shrank more into her own inward life, and more and more from all personal contact with the great unknown world outside of her own existence. She had settled so deeply into one groove of life and labor, there seemed to be no mortal power that could wrest