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.