e additions to
our knowledge; they suggest the necessity of reconstructing our theories
and placing them on a new and wider base.

A Memorial of Alice and Phoebe Cary. By Mary Clemmer Ames. New York:
Hurd & Houghton.

Alice Cary was a poetess of feeling, tender, prolific, overworked,
unhealthy, and cooked to desiccation in a New York "elegant residence"
that was but one enormous stove. Phoebe, working less, was amusing,
plump, gay and original. Alice, obediently grinding out her sweet
morning poem for the _Ledger_ before she went to market, died at her
desk, and then Phoebe died of loneliness. It is a gentle and a
thoroughly American history. In the eyes of both these Ohio women, New
York was the market where they could easiest sell their wares, and their
poems were commodities from which they were determined to derive as
comfortable an existence as possible. Any strict idea of duty to their
art, as the responsibility committed to them above all things on earth,
seems never to have crossed the mind of either sister, though Alice, who
wrote a great many volumes, would occasionally complain--not, however,
more feelingly than all sincere authors do--that she knew her labors
were overtaxing her faculty. They arranged, at their handsome residence
on Twentieth street, a _salon_ of Sunday evenings, where Mr. Greeley,
Robert Bonner and Whitelaw Reid used to meet and converse kindly with
the minor literati, and which were believed to have much of the
pleasantness and life of French conversaziones. Alice Cary has left a
profusion of pensive poetry: the following is the most beautiful extract
she affords:

The fisher droppeth his net in the stream,
And a hundred streams are the same as one;
And the maiden dreameth her lovelit dream;
And what is it all when all is done?
The net of the fisher the burden breaks,
And always the dreaming the dreamer wakes.

Phoebe, who was reckoned less clever than Alice, excites a great deal
more sympathy, quietly accepting a position of admiring secondariness,
and yielding occasional good things in wit or poetry: she was famed
among her friends as a punster and parodist, and once answered at a
dinner to a question what wine they used, "Oh, we drink Heidsick, but we
keep mum." An irresistibly taking and womanly remark of hers, disposing
in its own way of whole schemes of Calvinistic theology, was her reply
to the argument for endless punishment: "Well, if God ever s