Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 174: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Mar. 13, 1877,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 482-484 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 482, continued:]

174. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 319

To one who calls himself my “friend,”

In your letter of March 19 [Feb. 14], [18]77, you informed me that you had lent Didier's “Memoir” which I sent you to “a friend,” — that I should find his notice of it in the London Athenaeum for Feb. 10. On [page 483:] Saturday, April [March] 3, the day after I mailed my reply to you, I went to our Providence Library to look at the notice.

As I entered the reading room, Mr. C. Fiske Harris, who was standing near one of the alcoves, came to meet me & asked if I had seen your attack on me in the London Athenaeum.(1)

I thought at first there was some mistake. The paper had been removed from the reading room for later issues, but Mr. Harris presently procured me a copy from the Librarian.

That you should have directed my attention to this singular performance surprises me. Mr. Bartlett has just procured me a copy from Cambridge, the periodical being furnished here only to subscribers, and I have re-read the virulent article with renewed astonishment.

Of course these gentlemen who are devotedly my friends feel that no friend of mine would have written or authorized such an unprovoked assault.

Let us not revert to it. The matter itself was of little moment, but the animus of it gave a rude shock to all my previous impressions of the young Englishman who in his generous advocacy of an American poet had invoked my aid, sought my confidence and my criticism, and hailed me as his “Providence”!

“It was not an enemy who had done this” — it was my trusted friend & correspondent, a gentleman of whom no one had previously written to me or spoken in my presence a single word which might not have been written or spoken to one known as your faithful & inviolable friend! It was a startling & strange revelation — a wound that time cannot heal.

Let me briefly revert to your letter. You say you did not know that I was acquainted with Miss Blackwell! It seems incredible that you should so soon have forgotten all that I have told you in relation to her. Not very long ago I sent you a brief note from her, dated Sept. 1848, in which she speaks of her regret at not having been well enough to see me when I called at her hotel in the morning with E.A.P., & makes playful allusion to the rose-garden, asking if the roses were still blooming. Apparently you must have returned her note to me without reading it.

And now you tell me you do not think Poe was in Richmond until June 1849, having “pretty full knowledge of Poe's whole time for 1848.” If you have still in your possession the copy made at your request of Poe's long letter to me, dated Sunday evening, October 1, 1848, you will see what Poe himself says about this matter.(2) If you have any doubts of the genuineness of the letter you can apply to our friend Davidson who had the original in his possession from March 1858 to June 21 of the same year. [page 484:]

I have had no correspondence with Mr. Didier for months & the only intelligence which I have communicated to him was contained in the letter which he introduced as an “Introductory” one, but the few brief letters which I have received from him have had a character of manliness, sincerity, & courtesy which impressed me very favorably, & his book has confirmed the impression, nor do I yet understand the ground of your displeasure against him. As to the Scribner poem, I have long known from friends in Baltimore that the facsimile was a genuine one. Mr. Didier himself has never alluded to the subject in his correspondence with me. But there are other papers in the same handwriting whose authenticity is unquestionable & which I understand will soon be published by another collector of autographs.

We seem to have been “like ships that speak each other on the sea, then pass to meet no more.”

Vale atque vale.

 

1. This is, of course, the “severe skull dragging” Ingram mentioned, p. 474.

2. See Ostrom, II, 387, for complete text. Poe says clearly that he was in Richmond in the summer of 1848.