Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 159: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Aug. 25, 1876,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 450-451 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 450:]

159. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 299

My dear Mr. Ingram,

I duly received your welcome letter of ten days ago [Aug. 3?], & have since received two copies of the London Athenaeum containing your valuable paper on the poems. Learning that Mr. Harris was in town yesterday (I have not seen him for weeks, having been too ill to see anyone), I sent him the copy intended for him. I have been utterly prostrated by the weather and write even this brief note with difficulty. I have tried to write by every Wednesday & Saturday steamer since I received your last, but without being able to accomplish my purpose.

Have not yet answered the letter of our friend Rose. (Our friend and mine), Mrs. Paulina Wright Davis, died last night. She knew your friends, Mrs. Nichols & Mrs. Houghton. I shall have much to say to Rose if I live to write her as I wish. Tell her this, if you see her.

I told you that I had not hesitated to deny that paragraph in the Home Journal attributed to Mrs. Oakes Smith about a personal assault on Poe by the friends of one whom he had mined & betrayed. I wrote to her for the first time in ten or twelve years to tell her that I had done so, that is, to express my conviction that it did not emanate from her, was not written by her, not authorized by her. I send you her card in reply. Since then I have had two most kind letters from her. In the last, dated August 18, she says, “Mr. Ingram is doing a just & true work in regard to Mr. Poe. He tells me he dedicated it to you. Is it not strange how malice follows up this dead-living genius?”

I enclose to you a copy of an article which I wrote for the Providence Journal some five weeks ago. Perhaps the work treating of the challenge sent by Pinckney, and challenge which he dared to refuse, may have some bearing on the question involved in the note which you would have expunged from “Marginalia.”

I am getting very tired. Will write by Wednesday's steamer, if possible.

I long to see the whole of the Uneda correspondence & Mrs. Weiss's article in the Herald. I long to know all you have learned about Mrs. Stanard.

Everything here is in a state of collapse. Is the world coming to an end, think you?

I hope your visit to Paris will make you quite well. Gill has been achieving notoriety by sliding down a ravine of the White mountains! To me he is as the “missing link” or the “Lost Pleiad.”

Benedicte,

I want you to tear off the outside leaf of this sheet & send it back to [page 451:] me. What if it should go before the world with all its blots, in some coming era when your residuary legatees come into possession!