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ALICE AND PHEBE CAREY.

ARE "Sisters of the West," natives and residents of a pleasant village in Ohio.  The little we have learned of their history—that they are young and fatherless, and in a position that commands few, if any, advantages for intellectual culture—makes us look with more than usual interest upon their poems.  They were collected and published in Philadelphia, December 1849.  In some pages of this volume are discovered a nobility and independence of thought, in others a breadth of sympathy, and in others a fervor of imagination, according to the character of the sister who penned them, but in the minds of both alike we see the genuine poet.

ALICE.

THE BROKEN HOUSEHOLD.

VAINLY, vainly, memory seeks
Round our father's knee,
Laughing eyes and rosy cheeks,
Where they used to be:
Of the circle once so wide,
Three are wanderers, three have died.

Golden-hair'd and dewy-eyed,
Prattling all the day,
Was the baby, first that died;
O, 'twas hard to lay
Dimpled hand and cheek of snow,
In the grave so dark and low!
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ALICE AND PHEBE CAREY.  553

Smiling back on all who smiled,
Ne'er by sorrow thrall'd,
Half a woman, half a child,
Was the next God call'd;
Then a grave more deep and wide.
Made they by the baby's side.

When or where the other died
Only heaven can tell;
Treading manhood's path of pride,
Was he when he fell;
Haply thistles, blue and red,
Bloom about his lonesome bed.

I am for the living three
Only left to pray;
Two are on the stormy sea—
Farther still than they,
Wanders one his young heart dim,
Oftenest—most—I pray for him.

Whatsoe'er they do or dare,
Wheresoe'er they roam,
Have them, Father, in thy care,
Guide them safely home;
Home, O Father, in the sky,
Where none wander and none die.

HYMN OF THE TRUE MAN.

PEACE to the True Man's ashes!  Weep not for those
Whose days in old delusions have grown dim;
Such lives as his are triumphs, and their close
An immortality: weep not for him.
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Transcription Notes:
2 young ladies from Philadelphia write this poem in 1849 their dad passed he had golden hair the also had a sibling that passed away