Page:The Poets and Poetry of the West.djvu/359

ALICE GARY. Alice Cart, now conceded to be one of the most eminent writers, in prose and verse, which this country has produced, is a native of Ohio, having been born in Ham- ikon county, near Cincinnati, in April, 1820. She is descended from a worthy stock, on her father's side being of Huguenot, Puritan and Revohitionary blood. During the fearful persecution of the Huguenots in France, waged in the latter part of the sixteenth century, Walter Cary, with his wife and son, escaped into England. Being a person of some means, the father was enabled to educate his son — named also Wal- ter — liberally at Cambridge. After taking his degrees, Walter, jr. emigrated to Amer- ica — then the land of promise to all entertaining his views — and located himself at Bridgewater, sixteen miles distant from the parent colony of Plymouth, There he essayed the office of teacher, opening a "grammar-school" — the first in America. Walter had seven sons. One, John, settled at Windham, Connecticut. He had five sons, — the youngest, Samuel, being great-grandfather to Alice and Phoebe Cary. Samuel was liberally educated at Yale College ; and, having studied medicine, prac- ticed successfully in Lynn, Connecticut, where, in 1763, the grandfather of the sisters was born. At eighteen he answered the call " to arms ! " and served his country faith- fully through the momentous struggle of the Revolution. After peace was declared, with thousands of others scarred and bruised in their country's cause, he was turned upon the world with no other wealth than an honor unsullied and a stout, brave, hope- ful heart. He took his government "promise to pay" in lands in the then North- western Territory — settling, after much "prospecting," at what is still the homestead in Hamilton county, where the father of the sisters still lives, enjoying the honored regard of that "Clovernook" neighborhood which Alice has so exquisitely daguerreo- typed in her Clovernook Papers," and " Clovernook Children " and " Country Life." Of the mother of the sisters, long since dead, Alice writes : " My mother was of English descent — a woman of superior intellect, and of a good, well-ordered life. In my memory she stands apart from all others, wiser and purer, doing more and loving better than any other woman." In the quiet, almost cloistered, life at " Clovernook," Alice passed the years up to 1850. Educational privileges were, in her girlhood, vastly more restricted than at the present moment ; but, to one of her temperament and thoughtful cast of mind, her daily life was a text-book, and communion with nature a sermon, which served to in- terpret the profound mysteries of being and feeling more elFectively than "schooling" could have done for her. For a companion of her early years, she had an elder sister to whom she thus refers : — "A beloved (elder) sister sliared with me in work and play and study ; we were never separated for a day, Slie was older than I, more cheer- ful and self-reliant. I used to recite to her my rude verses, which she praised ; and she in turn told me stories of her own composing, which 1 at the time thought evinced (, 343 )