MISS CARY’S LOVER’S DIARY
Tickner & Fields
A LOVER’S DIARY, Alice Cary,
The course of true love, which runs more smoothly in Miss Cary’s ,melodious verses than it ever did between real Lysander and Hermia, is celebrated in this dainty volume with a certain graceful softness of expression, rather than with then intensity of ardent passion. The hero tells his no over romantic story with commendable naiveté, revealing the hope and fears and joys which have checkered his experience in frank and delicate phases, if not with andacious vigor of description His language perpetually betrays the contagious influence of the poets whose company he has kept reminding us of their fragrant beauty, as rose-water reminds us of a rose garden. If he shows but a slight degrees of creative power, we must remember that this was not essential in the diary of a lover, and thankfully accept in its place the purity and sweetness of sentiment which seems native in his heart, and the gracious trust with which he welcomes us to his innermost confidence. The limpid flow of his versification is in admirable keeping with the tender affectionateness of his feelings. And the soft rural images of the natural beauty amid which his love was born and happily rewarded. The picture of his little sweetheart seven years old retained the simple charm of the original.
When I remember the time we met
I pause for a little, and give god praise,
That he, of his grace, in my life has set,
That gladdest, goldenest day of my days.
Breaking out of her homespun gown
Just like a wild-flower out of its burr;
Legs bare to the knees, and the shoulders down
To the waist, I marveled and mused at her.
Her hands had been kissed and kissed by the sun
Brown as berries: she held her hair
Away from her dove like eyes with one,
And stared at me, straight as eyes could stare.
One moment—then being well content,
She dropt the tresses, that over the white,
Clear brow and sweet eyes came and went
Life shadows blowing across the light.
“A picture, such as the painter loves,”
I said, and passed, but she would not stay;
Those sweet eyes staring, round as dove’s,
Hold me and haunted me all the day.
One foot on the other, bare and brown—
The shining full of her dead-leaf hair-
Legs and shoulders our of her gown—
She held me and haunted me, everywhere.
The lovely maiden lost no one of her winning traits as she grew up to girlhood
My darling, dove-eyed Mona,
What a merry tune she sings,
And her feet they fly along the grass
Like little milk-white wings!
In her life and in the season
‘T is the golden edge o’ th’ May,
And her heart is like a flower that lies
In the sunshine all the day.
The cows that feed in the meadow,
They know her song like a call,
And life their heads from the clover,
And follow her, one and all –
Along the daisied hillsides,
And through the valley green,
As loyal to the little maid
As subjects to their queen.
Seeing her, you would say the year
Had stolen the tender streaks
From all the wilding of the woods
And put them in her cheeks
Mona, my dove eyed Mona
.She is fair and she is gay,
And I would that for her beauty’s sake
It might be always May.
By the time she was fifteen, her lover finds her a paragon of perfection, in no respect inferior to the angels, and with perhaps a trifle too little of reserve invites us to share his infatuation
Her language is so sweet and fit
You never have enough of it
IF she smiles, the house is bright
With any candle-light
Whether that her hair is rolled
Round an ivory comb, or gold,
Pinned or no, I cannot tell,
In itself it shines so well.
Whether she doth wear her coat
Loose, or buttoned to the throat,
Hems or ruffles, plain or gay,
Seems to me the sweetest way
She’s so pitiful to all
Sighs, as if by chance, for fall
Daily, in her childlike prayers
Getting heavenward unawares.
Every little word she speaks
Sends the color to her cheeks,
Ripping high and rippling low,
Over bosom, over brow;
So, if stripped of dress and vail,
Like Godiva in the tale
Modesty with blushes sweet
Would clothe her all from head to feet.
By her innocence she awes
Wvil from her; through love’s laws
That so bind us like a cord
Each to all, she seeks the Lord.
Our reader will rejoice to be explicitly apprized of what we have already hinted, that the heart of the good little Mona was as tender as her form was fair, and that in due time the supplications of the lover-received their natural answer. The curtain does not fall even after marriage, and we are regaled with fine glimpses of domestic felicity that has survived the light and shade of rapid years.
Sweetly we live, my wife and I,
Sweetly, all the time
As a May rose in her house of leaves,
Or a poet in his rhyme.
Oft in her pale and quiet checks
A dash of red doth show
Her heart is fluttering like a wheel
In the wave of love below.
I call my good wife Charity
And she blushes at the name
Though she gave the light of her hair and eyes,
To our baby, when it came.
Sweetly we live—her gentle brows
Know not the way to frown
And I never see that her head is gray
And her shoulders stooping down.
The admirers of Miss Cary’s poetry will doubtless recognize in these extracts the qualities which have given her a warm and cherished place in the affections of many American households. Her new volume affords an attractive illustration of her powers of fancy and expression, her genuine womanly nature, and her familiarity with the highest living examples of poetical inspiration. It is brought our in a beautiful holiday style, with pictorial embellishments from the hands of several popular artists.
Title: MISS CARY’S LOVER’S DIARY
Author: Tickner & Fields
Location:
Year:
Media: Newspaper article, glued to page 2 of the Ledger of Captain W. B.
Blair
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