Cary, Alice - 1871

CARY

Posted By: Janice Sowers (email)
Date: 3/11/2004 at 11:38:10

Howard County Times March 2, 1871

ALICE CARY

At the funeral of this gifted and much loved writer, Dr. Deers, her pastor spoke as follows:

I have not thought of a single word to say today, and I do not know that it is necessary to say one word more than is set down in the church service. Most of you know and loved Alice Cary, and to those who did not know her my words would fail in describing the sweetness and gentleness of her disposition and temper. It seems, indeed, that instead of standing here, I, too, should be sitting there among the mourners. The speaker then described the patience with which she had borne her last sickness, and told how he had been by her side when the pain was so intense that the prints of her fingernails would be left in the palm of his hand as he was holding hers, but she never made a complaint. She was a parishoner, said he, who came very close to my heart in her suffering and sorrow. I saw how true she was, and the interest she had in all the work I had in hand; and I feel as if an assistant had died out of my family. The people of my congregation who did not know ought to be glad that I did. How many traits of tenderness have come before you here, how many observations have I been able to make to you, because I had been with her! Today I can only make my lament over her as you do, in the simplicity of affection. Men loved Alice Cary, and women loved her. When a man loves a woman it is of nature; when a women loves a women it is of grace--of the grace that woman makes by her loveliness, and it is one of the finest things that can be said of Alice Cary, that she had such troops of friends of her own sex. On the public side of her life she had honor on the private side the tenderest affection.

And now she has gone from our mortal sight, but not from the eyes of our souls. She has gone from her pain, as she desired to die, in sleep, and after a deep slumber she has passed into the morning of immortality. The last time I saw her I took down her works and alighted on the passage, so full of consonance with anthems just sung by the choir, and almost like a prophecy of the manner in which she passed away:

My soul is full of whispered sorrows,

My blindness is my sight;

The shadows that I feared so long

Are all alive with light.

There was one thing in Alice Cary of which we had better remind ourselves now because many of us are working people, and people who work very much with our brain; and I see a number of young people who have come out of tenderness to her memory to the church today, and there may be among them literary people just commencing their career, and they say, "Would I could write as beautifully and so easily as she did." It was not easily done. She did nothing easily; but in all this that we read she was an earnest worker; she was faithful, painstaking, careful of improving herself up to the last moment of her life. Yesterday I looked into the drawer, and the last piece of MS., she wrote turned up, and I said to Phebe, "That is copied," and she said, "No, that is Alice's writing." It was so exceedingly plain it looked like print in large type, though she wrote a wretched hand. But her sister told me that when she came to be so weak that she couldn't write much any longer, she began to practice like a little girl, to learn to form all her letters anew. She worked to the very last, not only with the brains but the fingers.

When Phebe wrote me last Sunday that Alice was gone, I couldn't help telling my people, and there was a sob heard that went through the congregation. It was from an old lady, a friend of hers, who often told me about her and spoke of her nobility of soul. Alice Cary once thought of making a cap for her, and she said, " I will make a cap for Mrs. Brown," but her fingers ached so, and her arm became so tired, she had to drop it; an the needle is sticking in that unfinished cap now, just as she left it. She would have finished it, but they had finished her own crown in glory, and she couldn't stay away from her coronation. And now I will not shed a tear for Alice Cary; I'm glad she is gone. I felt at once like saying, "Thanks be to God," when I heard the pain was over; and it was so delightful to go to stand over her and see her face without a single frown, and to think "She is gone to her Father and my Father;" and into His hands I commit her.