Thus, through the heavy cloud of human loss and longing the lark-like song arose into the very precinct of celestial light, sweet with unfaltering faith and undying love to the very last. The timid soul that fainted in its mortal house grew reassured and calm, rising to the realization of eternal verities. The

world is better because this woman lived, and loved, and believed. She wrote, not to blazon her own being upon the world, not to drop upon the weary multitude the weight of an oppressive personality. She drew from the deep wells of an unconscious and overflowing love the bright waters of refreshment and health. Her subtler insight, her finer intuition, her larger trust, her more buoyant hope, are the world's helpers, all. The simplest word of such a soul thrills with an inexpressible life. It helps to make us braver, stronger, more patient, and more glad. We fulfill the lowliest task more perfectly, are more loyal to our duty, more loving to each other and to God, in the turmoil of the world, in the wearing care of the house, in sorrow as well as in joy, if by a single word we are drawn nearer to the all-encircling and everlasting Love. To do this, as a writer, was the mission of Phoebe Cary. Perhaps no lines which she has written express more characteristically or perfectly her devout and childlike faith in a loving Father's ordering of her earthly life, than the poem which closes her "Poems of Faith, Hope, and Love."

RECONCILED.

O years, gone down into the past;
What pleasant memories come to me,

HYMNS OF FAITH.

Of your untroubled days of peace,
And hours almost of ecstasy !

Yet would I have no moon stand still,
Where life's most pleasant valleys lie ;
Nor wheel the planet of the day

Back on his pathway through the sky.

For though, when youthful pleasures died,
My youth itself went with them, too;
To-day, aye! even this very hour,

Is the best time I ever knew.

Not that my Father gives to me
More blessings than in days gone by;
Dropping in my uplifted hands

All things for which I blindly cry:

But that his plans and purposes

Have grown to me less strange and dim; And where I cannot understand,

I trust the issues unto Him.

And, spite of many broken dreams,
This have I truly learned to say,
The prayers I thought unanswered once,
Were answered in God's own best way.

And though some dearly cherished hopes
Perished untimely ere their birth,
Yet have I been beloved and blessed

Beyond the measure of my worth.

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And sometimes in my hours of grief,

For moments I have come to stand
Where, in the sorrows on me laid
I felt a loving Father's hand.

And I have learned the weakest ones
Are kept securest from life's harms;
And that the tender lambs alone

Are carried in the Shepherd's arms.

And sitting by the wayside blind,
He is the nearest to the light,
Who crieth out most earnestly,
"Lord, that I might receive my sight!

O feet, grown weary as ye walk,
Where down life's hill my pathway lies,
What care I, while my soul can mount,
As the young eagle mounts the skies!

O eyes, with weeping faded out,
What matters it how dim ye be?
My inner vision sweeps, untired,
The reaches of eternity!

O death, most dreaded power of all,

When the last moment comes, and thou

Darkenest the windows of my soul, Through which I look on nature now ;

Yea, when mortality dissolves,

Shall I not meet thine hour unawed?
My house eternal in the heavens
Is lighted by the smile of God !

PHOEBE CARY THE WOMAN.

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CHAPTER X.

PHOEBE CARY. -THE WOMAN.

There are

THE wittiest woman in America is dead. others who say many brilliant things; but I doubt if there is another so spontaneously and pointedly witty, in the sense that Sidney Smith was witty, as Phoebe Cary. The drawback to almost everybody's wit and repartee is that it so often seems premeditated. It is a fearful chill to a laugh to know that it is being watched for, and had been prepared beforehand. But there was an absolute charm in Phoebe's wit; it was spontaneous, so coruscating, so "pat." Then it was full of the delight of a perpetual surprise. She was just as witty at breakfast as she was at dinner, and would say something just as astonishingly bright to one companion, and she a woman, as to a roomful of cultivated men, doing their best to parry her flashing scimitars of speech. Though so liberally endowed with the poetic utterance and insight, she first beheld every object literally, not a ray of glamour about it; she saw its practical and ludicrous relations first, and from this absolutely matter-of-fact perception came the sparkling utterance which saw it, caught it, played with it, and held it up in the same instant. It is pleasant to think of a friend who made you laugh so many happy times, but who never made you weep.

For instantaneously as her arrow of wit came, it sprung from too kind a heart ever to be tipped with a sting. There was always a prevailing vein of good nature in her most satirical or caustic remarks. Indeed, satire and sarcasm rarely sought vent in her glittering speech; it was fun, sheer fun, usually, as kindly innocent in spirit as it was ludicrous and brilliant in utterance. But a flash of wit, like a flash of lightning, can only be remembered, it cannot be reproduced. Its very marvel lies in its spontaneity and evanescence; its power is in being struck from the present. Divorced from that, the keenest representation of it seems cold and dead. We read over the few remaining sentences which attempt to embody the repartees and bon mots of the most famous wits of society, such as Beau Nash, Beau Brummel, Madame Du Deffand, and Lady Mary Montagu; we wonder at the poverty of these memorials of their fame. Thus it must be with Phoebe Cary. Her most brilliant sallies were perfectly unpremeditated, and by herself never repeated, or remembered. When she was in her best moods, they came like flashes of heat lightning, like a rush of meteors, so suddenly and constantly you were dazzled while you were delighted, and afterward found it difficult to single out any distinct flash, or separate meteor from the multitude. A niece of Phoebe says that when a school-girl she often thought of writing down in a book the marvelous things which she heard her Aunt Phoebe say every day. Had she carried out her resolution, her book would now be the largest volume of Phoebe Cary's thoughts. As it is, this most wonderful of all her gifts can only be represented by a few stray sen