[Illustration: ALICE CARY 1820-1871]
During their life in New York, Phoebe had had numerous offers of marriage, but it had never cost her anything to say, "I don't want to marry anybody." Soon after the beginning of Alice's invalid days, however, Phoebe received an offer of marriage from a man whom she felt that she could love, and with whom she was sure she could be happy. She had always felt that in the home she was second to Alice, and she confessed once to a friend, "Sometimes I feel a yearning to have a life of my very own; my own house and work and friends; and to feel myself the center of all."
However, much as it cost her, she resolutely put away the thought of this possible happiness because she knew that her sister could not endure her absence in what were very clearly the last days of her life.
In February, 1870, Alice Cary died, and Phoebe from that time on seemed but half a person. To one of her friends she said pathetically: "For thirty years I have gone straight to her bedside as soon as I arose in the morning, and wherever she is, I am sure she wants me now." She tried to take up her work—indeed she felt that in her sister's absence she had double work to do; but it was of no use, and in a little more than a year after her sister's death she too died.
These two sisters, who were so constantly associated for so many years, differed very decidedly in many respects. Alice, the frailer in body, was much the stronger in will power; indeed her ability to force herself to begin and to stick to anything which she thought was to be done was the marvel of her friends. This intense energy often jarred on the more easy-going Phoebe, just as Phoebe's refusal to do literary work unless she were exactly in the right mood, often jarred upon Alice. However, the two sisters never showed their irritation; they were always sweet and gentle in their dealings with each other.
Naturally, Alice's superior energy resulted in an output of literary work which was much larger than Phoebe's. There was a difference, too, besides that of quantity in the work of the sisters. Alice possessed a more objective imagination, that is, she could, in the ballads which she was so fond of writing, place herself in the position of those whom she was describing, and make their feelings her own. Phoebe, on the other hand, in her serious poems held more closely to her own experiences. Both the sisters were very fond of children, though in a different way, Alice feeling for them a sort of mother-love, while Phoebe always felt toward them as though they were comrades. It is the genuine love for children which makes the children's stories and poems of Alice and Phoebe Cary live.
Shortly after Phoebe died one of her friends wrote, "The wittiest woman in America is dead;" and constantly on all sides was heard the saying, "O, if I had only taken down the many wonderfully bright things that I heard her say!" Her parodies have rarely been excelled, and some of her humorous poems are irresistibly funny. The best known perhaps of her parodies is the one on Longfellow's The Day Is Done, of which a stanza may be quoted here. For the original stanza which runs:
"I see the lights of the village
Gleam through the rain and the 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 the rain,"
Phoebe Gary substituted the words:
"I see the lights of the baker
Gleam through the rain and the mist,
And a feeling of hunger comes o'er me,
That my soul cannot resist:
A feeling of sadness and longing
That is not like being sick
And resembles sorrow only,
As a brickbat resembles a brick."