Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 179: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Jan. 16, 1877,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 492-493 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 492, continued:]

179. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 329

Dear Mr. Ingram,

Thanks for your interesting enclosures and for the significant quotation from George Sand.(1)

I might transcribe it as my sole reply, in heartfelt sincerity & good-will.

If your words in some of those letters of the past, to me, eventful year, caused me profound pain at the time, the via dolorosa which I have of late been called to tread has effaced all minor sorrows, and regrets.

I remember only the happiness I felt in your earlier sympathy & friendship.

I have had from my dear Rose a letter that cheered and blessed me. Tell her this when you write. I am for the present in the beautiful home of the Dailey's, which she knows well, doubtless, with all my household gods around me, saving such as fell under the auctioneer's hammer.(2) The walls of my room are hung with mirrors old & new, & with pictures of the same diverse epochs of history.

I am sitting before a cheerful wood fire in an upper-room looking out on fields & meadows & pleasant gardens. Apollo — my Apollo stands on a pedestal at the door of entrance in the upper hall — my Venus of Milo adorns the lower hall, and my bronze censer from the palace of the Emperor of Peking breathes myrrh & sandalwood from its dragon's mouth, whenever the company in the parlor below wishes to be “drowsed in the Orient's dusky thought.”

I do not know that I ever sent you the lines written in my old home & dedicated to a friend who had just died at St. Helena, S.C. The picture of the old place is dearer to me now, since I shall never see it again as it was.

I read with interest your paper & the article by J.H.I. which it contained.(3)

I write in haste.

With dearest love to Rose, to whom I will write soon.

I am most sincerely your friend,

[page 493:]

Davidson has been very ill of malarial fever since his autumnal visit to Florida, but writes that he is recovering.

 

1. If Mrs. Whitman dated this letter accurately, there is a missing Ingram letter. Although Ingram writes in his next letter (No. 180, Feb. 2, 1878) as if it were his first communication with her since his embittered farewell of Apr. 26, 1877, the dates on both holographs (Nos. 179 and 180) are clear, and internal evidence suggests that the missing letter was written in early December 1877 (seep. 493 and page 494, n.1). If both writers are referring to the same enclosures (which have not survived), Ingram may have sent in December only enclosures and an apparently conciliatory quotation from George Sand in an effort to determine Mrs. Whitman's feelings toward him, and Number 180 may be his first real letter since their break, hence his phrasing and tone.

2. After her sister's death, Mrs. Whitman disposed of many of her personal possessions and moved, by gracious invitation, into the home of Mrs. Albert Dailey and her daughters in Providence.

3. Almost certainly an account of Ingram's discovery of Poe's “The Journal of Julius Rodman,” which was printed in the London Athenaeum [[Mirror of Literature]], Nov. 3, 1877.