ALICE

CARY (1820-1871)  , and PHOEBE (1824-1871), American poets, were born at Mount Healthy, near Cincinnati, Ohio, respectively on the 26th of April 182o and the 4th of September 1824 . Their education was largely self-acquired, and their work in literature was always done in unbroken companionship . Their poems were first collected in a volume entitled Poems of Alice and Phoebe Carey [sic] (185o) . In 1850-1851 they removed to New York, where the two sisters, befriended by Rufus W.Griswold (1815-1857), the quasi-dictator of American verse, and Horace Greeley, occupied a prominent position in literary circles . In 1868-1869 Alice Cary served for a short time as the first president of Sorosis, the first woman's club organized in New York . Alice, who was much the more voluminous writer of the two, wrote prose sketches and novels, now almost forgotten, and various volumes of verse, notably The Lover's Diary (1868) . Her lyrical poem, Pictures of Memory, was much admired by Edgar Allan Poe . Phoebe published two volumes of poems (1854 and 1868), but is best known as the author of the hymn " Nearer Home," beginning " One sweetly solemn thought," written in 1852 . Alice died in New York City on the 12th of February 1871, and Phoebe in Newport, Rhode Island, on the 31st of July of the same year . The collected Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary were published in Boston in 1886 . See Mrs Mary Clemmer Ames's Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Carey (New York, 1873) .