Educated at Lancaster Academy; achieved fame in 1845 for her poem, "Little Things". She wrote for Universalist and other periodicals; many of her poems were set to music and published in school text-books or as hymns. She married 1849 Thomas J Carney, a Universalist minister; four of the couple's nine children died in infancy.


Little Things
by Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.

So the little moments,i
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of Eternity.

So the little errors
Lead the soul away
From the paths of virtue
Far in sin to stray.

Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the Heaven above.

Thanks to HJ for the poem.


From Carl Sandburg's "Always The Young Strangers"
The Dirty Dozen Chapter
Of those days of play and sport in the street in front of our house one tender and curious memory stands out. The house next east to ours straight across the street was an average two-story frame affair, with a porch perhaps fifteen feet long. In the street in front of this house was our home base when playing ball. Often we saw on that porch rocking in a chair a little old woman, her hair snow-white with the years. She had a past, a rather bright though not dazzling past, you might say. She could lay claim to fame, if she chose. Millions of children reading the McGuffey and other school readers had met her name and memorized lines she had written. For there was in the course of her years in the English language more widely published, known, and recited than her lines about "Little Things".
She was Julia Carney, her sons Fletcher and James being Universalists and Lombard graduates, Fletcher serving three or four terms as mayor of Galesburg. There she sat in the quiet of her backward-gazing thoughts, sometimes gently rocking, while we hooted and yelled over hits, runs, putouts. There she sat, an image of silence and rest, while the air rang with boy screams, "Hit it bang on the nose now!" "Aw, he couldn't hit a balloon!" "Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea!" She made no request "for the benefit of those who have retired." To us at that time she was just one more nice old woman who wouldn't bother boys at play. We didn't know that her writings were in books and newspaper reprints that reached millions of readers. The Carneys were good neighbors and she was one of them - that was all we knew.
We should have heard about her in school. We should have read little pieces about her in the papers. She has a tiny quaint niche in the history of American literature under which one line could be written: "She loved children and wrote poems she hoped children would love." As late as the year 1952 Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower in a magazine article quoted the poem "Little Things" as one of her childhood delights.

Educated at Lancaster Academy; achieved fame in 1845 for her poem, "Little Things". She wrote for Universalist and other periodicals; many of her poems were set to music and published in school text-books or as hymns. She married 1849 Thomas J Carney, a Universalist minister; four of the couple's nine children died in infancy.


Little Things
by Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

Little drops of water,
Little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean
And the pleasant land.

So the little moments,i
Humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages
Of Eternity.

So the little errors
Lead the soul away
From the paths of virtue
Far in sin to stray.

Little deeds of kindness,
Little words of love,
Help to make earth happy
Like the Heaven above.

Thanks to HJ for the poem.


From Carl Sandburg's "Always The Young Strangers"
The Dirty Dozen Chapter
Of those days of play and sport in the street in front of our house one tender and curious memory stands out. The house next east to ours straight across the street was an average two-story frame affair, with a porch perhaps fifteen feet long. In the street in front of this house was our home base when playing ball. Often we saw on that porch rocking in a chair a little old woman, her hair snow-white with the years. She had a past, a rather bright though not dazzling past, you might say. She could lay claim to fame, if she chose. Millions of children reading the McGuffey and other school readers had met her name and memorized lines she had written. For there was in the course of her years in the English language more widely published, known, and recited than her lines about "Little Things".
She was Julia Carney, her sons Fletcher and James being Universalists and Lombard graduates, Fletcher serving three or four terms as mayor of Galesburg. There she sat in the quiet of her backward-gazing thoughts, sometimes gently rocking, while we hooted and yelled over hits, runs, putouts. There she sat, an image of silence and rest, while the air rang with boy screams, "Hit it bang on the nose now!" "Aw, he couldn't hit a balloon!" "Down went McGinty to the bottom of the sea!" She made no request "for the benefit of those who have retired." To us at that time she was just one more nice old woman who wouldn't bother boys at play. We didn't know that her writings were in books and newspaper reprints that reached millions of readers. The Carneys were good neighbors and she was one of them - that was all we knew.
We should have heard about her in school. We should have read little pieces about her in the papers. She has a tiny quaint niche in the history of American literature under which one line could be written: "She loved children and wrote poems she hoped children would love." As late as the year 1952 Mrs. Dwight D. Eisenhower in a magazine article quoted the poem "Little Things" as one of her childhood delights.