Alice Cary (April 26, 1820 – February 12, 1871) was an American poet, and the older sister of fellow poet Phoebe Cary (1824–1871).
With hand on the spade and heart in the sky Dress the ground and till it; Turn in the little seed, brown and dry, Turn out the golden millet. Work, and your house shall be duly fed: Work, and rest shall be won; I hold that a man had better be dead Than alive when his work is done.
There must be room for penitence to mend Life's broken chance; else noise of wars would unmake heaven.
Even for the dead I will not bind my soul to grief, death cannot long divide; for is it not as if the rose that climbed my garden wall had bloomed the other side?
We cannot make bargains for blisses, Nor catch them like fishes in nets; And sometimes the thing our life misses, Helps more than the thing which it gets.
The fisher droppeth his net in the stream, And a hundred streams are the same as one; And the maiden dreameth her love-lit 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.
Every life is meant to help all lives; each man should live for all men's betterment.
I sit where the leaves of the maple and the gnarled and knotted gum are circling and drifting around me.
True worth is in being, not seeming
Shut up the door: who loves me must not look Upon the withered world, but haste to bring His lighted candle, and his story-book, And live with me the poetry of spring.
I hold that a man had better be dead than alive when his work is done.
True worth is in being, not seeming- In doing, each day that goes by, Some little good, not in the dreaming Of great things to do by and by. For whatever men say in their blindness, And spite of the fancies of youth, There's nothing so kingly as kindness, And nothing so royal as truth.
Yea, when mortality dissolves, Shall I not meet thine hour unawed? My house eternal in the heavens Is lighted by the smile of God!
The path of duty I clearly trace, I stand with conscience face to face, And all her pleas allow; Calling and crying the while for grace, - 'Some other time, and some other place; Oh, not to-day; not now!
I hold that Christian grace abounds Where charity is seen; that when We climb to heaven, 'tis on the rounds Of love to men.
Coldly and capriciously the slanting sunbeams fall.
For he who is honest is noble, Whatever his fortunes or birth.
How many lives we live in one, And how much less than one, in all.
Nothing in this low and ruined world bears the meek impress of the Son of God so surely as forgiveness.