ALICE CARY THE writer.

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CHAPTER VI.

ALICE CARY. THE WRITER.

As an artist in literature Alice Cary suffered, as so many women in this generation do, for lack of thorough mental discipline and those reserved stores of knowledge which must be gathered and garnered in youth. When the burden and the heat of the day came, when she needed them most, she had neither time nor strength to acquire them. Her early youth was spent chiefly in household drudgery. Her only chance for study was in dear snatches at books between her tasks, and by the kitchen fire through the long winter evenings. Referring to this period of her life, she said:

"In my memory there are many long, dark years of labor at variance with my inclinations, of bereavement, of constant struggle, and of hope deferred."

Thus, when her life-work and work for life came, she did it under the most hampering disadvantages, and often amid bodily suffering which any ordinary woman. would have made a sufficient excuse for absolute dependence upon others. Thus it was with her as with so many of her sisters.. So much of woman's work is artistically poor, not from any poverty of gift, but for lack of that practical training of the faculties which is indispensable to the finest workmanship. The power is there, but not the perfect mastery of the power. Alice's

natural endowment of mind and soul was of the finest and rarest; yet as an artistic force, she used it timidly, and at times awkwardly. She never, to her dying hour, reached her own standard; never, in any form of art, satisfied herself.

The great bulk Some of it, maybe, that is about all. I

About ten years ago she wrote to a friend in the West: “I am ashamed of my work. of what I have written is poor stuff. indicates ability to do better think I am more simple and direct, less diffuse and encumbered with ornament than in former years, all, probably, because I have lived longer and thought more."

In dealing with two forces, hers was the touch of mastery. As an interpreter of the natural world she was unsurpassed. And when she spoke from her own, never did she fail to strike the key-note to the human heart. Her absorbing love for nature, inanimate and human, her oneness with it, made her what she was, a poet of the people. She knew more of principles than of persons, more of nature than of either. Her mind was introspective. Instinctively she drew the very life of the universe into her soul, and from her soul sent it forth into life again. By her nothing in nature is forgotten or passed by. "The luminous creatures of the air," the cunning workers of the ground, "the dwarfed flower," and the "drowning mote," each shares something of her great human love, which, brooding over the very ground, rises and merges into all things beautiful. One can only wonder at the reverent and observant faculties, the widely embracing heart, which makes so many of God's loves its own. The following is a verse in her truest vein :

SPECULATIONS.

O for a single hour

To have life's knot of evil and self-blame
All straightened, all undone !

As in the time when fancy had the power
The weariest and forlornest day to bless,
At sight of any little common flower,

That warmed her pallid fingers in the sun,
And had no garment but her loveliness."

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After having lived in the city for twenty years, with not even a grassy plat of her own on which to rest her feet, the country sights and sounds, which made nearly thirty years of her life, faded into pictures of the past. In these days "life's tangled knot of evil," the phenomena of human existence, absorbed chiefly her heart and faculties. Much of the result of her questionings and replies we find in her "Thoughts and Theories." Even these are deeply veined with her passionate love of nature, though she speaks of it as a companion of the past. She says:

"I thank Thee that my childhood's vanished days Were cast in rural ways,

Where I beheld, with gladness ever new,
That sort of vagrant dew

Which lodges in the beggarly tents of such
Vile weeds as virtuous plants disdain to touch,
And with rough-bearded burs, night after night,
Upgathered by the morning, tender and true,
Into her clear, chaste light.

"Such ways I learned to know
That free will cannot go

Outside of mercy; learned to bless his name
Whose revelations, ever thus renewed
Along the varied year, in field and wood,
His loving care proclaim.

"I thank Thee that the grass and the red rose
Do what they can to tell

How spirit through all forms of matter flows;
For every thistle by the common way,
Wearing its homely beauty; for each spring
That, sweet and homeless, runneth where it will;
For night and day;

For the alternate seasons,

everything Pertaining to life's marvelous miracle."

But these later poems, with all their spiritual thought and insight, with all their tender retrospection, never equaled in freshness and fullness of melody, in a nameless rush of music, her first lyrics; those lyrics written when the young sou, attuned to every sound in nature, thrilling with the first consciousness of its visible and invisible life, like the reed of Pan, gave it all forth in music at the touch of every breeze. No wonder that so many pilgrims out in the world turned and listened to the first notes of a song so natural and "piercing sweet." To the dusty wayfarer the freedom and freshness and fullness of the winds and waves swept through it. Listen:

"Do you hear the wild birds calling?

Do you hear them, O my heart ?

Do you see the blue air falling

From their rushing wings apart?

TO THE WINDS.

"With young mosses they are flocking,
For they hear the laughing breeze
With dewy fingers rocking

Their light cradles in the trees! "

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And here is one of her early contributions to the "National Era," written before she was known to fame, and before she was paid money for her writing.

TO THE WINDS.

Talk to my heart, O winds
Talk to my heart to-night;

My spirit always finds

With you a new delight
Finds always new delight,
In your silver talk at night.

Give me your soft embrace

As you used to long ago,
In your shadowy trysting-place,
When you seemed to love me so
When you sweetly kissed me so,
On the green hills, long ago.

Come up from your cool bed,
In the stilly twilight sea,
For the dearest hope lies dead
That was ever dear to me;
Come up from your cool bed,
And we'll talk about the dead.

Tell me, for oft you go,

Winds lovely winds of night