Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 085: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Mar. 9, 1875,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 259-260 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 259:]

85. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 204

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Your last most interesting letter was dated Jan. 9 [29], just two months ago today!(1) So long an interval has not elapsed, since I knew you, between your letters. Yet, as you spoke of having to start on a tour of one or two months duration, through Great Britain & Ireland, as a possibility, I try to comfort myself by thinking that this is the reason of your silence; & then (aware that you have so many correspondents) I try not be anxious about you. Meantime, the winter has passed with me like a strange dream. The storms have been incessant, the cold unintermitting, and disease & death holding high carnival throughout the country. My friend, G. L. Dwight, who was so much interested about your work on Poe, died without seeing it, at Nassau, New Providence, & a fortnight ago I attended his funeral in Providence.

I read to Mr. Harris your message about Poe's 1829 edition of poems two days after receiving your letter. He told me that he ordered a friend to buy for him the edition of which I spoke — the one which he saw in New York. But his friend dissuaded him. The price was 50 dollars. He has reason to hope that he may soon obtain the other copy held by a friend of his in Boston. If he does, you shall see it. He told me about a fortnight ago that he had sent you one of his catalogues of American poetry, and he requested me to state to you that he should probably send in a fortnight or three weeks the 1831 edition to his bookbinder in London, & should send it inscribed to your address, that he should not like to entrust it to a registered post, thinking sending it by package to his bookbinder much safer. He thinks there is no doubt whatever as to the article in the Philobiblion having been written by Stoddard.

I saw the announcement in the Boston Commonwealth of Saturday, March 6, that your article was republished in the International for March.(2) The March Eclectic republishes the Saturday Review critique. I enclose the notices in the Commonwealth.

Rose writes me a charming letter about her Paris life. She thinks there never was such a dismal, doleful climate, & is sometimes desperately homesick. I doubt if she had not been more disconsolate in New England. Certainly nothing could have been worse than our own winter.

I am going to venture out into the snow & sleet to mail my letter for tomorrow's steamer, & to buy a copy of the International.

I long to hear from you and to know that all is well with you. Mr. Harris says you will understand that his Index, being intended chiefly for his own use, & for private circulation, sacrifices necessarily [page 260:] something to brevity. Thus he has given S.A. as the initials to all Mrs. L[ewis]'s poems & editions of poems, because the first was S.A. May heaven bless & prosper you, and all good angels guard you until we meet here or hereafter.

 

1. This letter was posted on Mar. 9, 1874.

2. Ingram's article “Edgar Allan Poe,” in the New York International Review (Mar.-Apr., 1875), 145-72, is but a condensation of the “Memoir” with which he had prefaced Vol. I of his 1874-75 edition of Poe's works and is therefore easily available.