CARY, ALICE (182o-1871), and PHOEBE (1824-1871), American poets, were born at Mount Healthy, near Cincinnati (Ohio), respectively on April 26, 182o, and Sept. 4, 1824. Their education was largely self-acquired, and their work in literature was always done in unbroken companionship. Their poems were first collected in a volume entitled Poems of Alice and Phoebe Carey (1850). Alice, who was much the more voluminous writer of the two, wrote prose sketches, novels and poems, the best of which treat the surroundings and friends of her girlhood. Her lyrical poem, "Pictures of Memory," was praised by Edgar Allan Poe. Phoebe published two volumes of poems (1854 and 1868), but is best known as the author of the hymn "Nearer Home," beginning "One sweetly solemn thought." Alice died in New York city, Feb. 12, 1871, and Phoebe in Newport (R.I.), July 31 of the same year.
The collected Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary were pub lished in Boston in i886.