PHOEBE CARY THE WRITER.

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CHAPTER IX.

PHOEBE CARY. THE WRITER.

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 an! lear, 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;

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
Is 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 sentence, 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 unsurpassed. 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 ;

PHEBE'S PARODIES.

A feeling of something like longing,
And slightly akin to pain,

That resembles hunger more than

The mist resembles rain."

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"Maud Muller" is one of the most sentimental as well as one of the most exquisite of modern ballads, yet what it prompts in Phoebe is not a tear for the faded woman sitting under the chimney log, nor a sigh for the judge who wholly deserves his fate, nor even an alas! for the "might have been." It prompts in her, as the most natural antithesis in the world,

KATE KETCHEM.

Kate Ketchem on a winter's night
Went to a party dressed in white.

Her chignon in a net of gold

Was about as large as they ever sold.

Gayly she went, because her "pap "
Was supposed to be a rich old chap.

But when by chance her glances fell
On a friend who had lately married well,

Her spirits sunk, and a vague unrest
And a nameless longing filled her breast

A wish she wouldn't have had made known,
To have an establishment of her own.

Tom Fudge came slowly through the throng,
With chestnut hair, worn pretty long.