Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 011: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Feb. 24, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 38-39 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 38, continued:]

11. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 124

My dear Mr. Ingram,

I mailed in time for the steamer that sailed on the 18th two letters, one enclosing an autograph letter. Be very careful of this & return it to me after you have taken a facsimile of such portions as you desire.

I shall send by tomorrow's steamer two cartes from the daguerre taken in this city under the circumstances which I described in a former letter, when the poet had wandered home but newly from that “Ultimate dim Thule.” The one in the oval is direct from the original, the other has gone through modifications & ameliorating processes. Neither of them give[s] an adequate idea of the stern & sombre grandeur of the original. I have left with the photographer the one which was taken for me a few days after this first sitting which has an entirely different character & is serene & elevated. The artist thinks that he can reproduce it, though the picture was injured by remaining too long in the camera. If he succeeds, I will send you a copy as soon as I can obtain one.

I believe I told you that I had written twice to Mr. Gill, but had received nothing from him for several weeks. This morning a letter arrived which I will transcribe for you:

In this letter he says nothing of a letter from Mr. Griswold which I lent him. It was written in the autumn of [18]49, after Poe's death. In it Griswold asked if Mr. Poe's letters had been returned to me — said that Mrs. Clemm told him they had all been returned to me; he had asked her for them, he said, in order to return them. He cautioned me to be very careful what I said to Mrs. Clemm, who was, he said, not my friend, nor anybody's friend. The letter was full of virulence & bitterness against her. I had not asked for my letters, nor even desired their return; nor had Poe, in the only letter which I received from him, after our last parting, asked me for his own. I believe that these letters, in their simplicity & directness & in the pure passion of their [page 39:] eloquence, contain more of his soul's strange inner life than anything that remains of his correspondence.

The first letter contains twelve closely written pages, the longest letter, as he assured me, that he had ever written, & from what I have learned from Mrs. Clemm & Mrs. Osgood on this subject, I cannot doubt that it was so. But I can only write you very briefly now. I have been ill & my time has been unavoidably occupied by various & pressing engagements. I intended simply to speak of Griswold's letter as an unauthorized attempt to advise me in a matter about which I had sought no advice & to prejudice me against one whose name I had never mentioned to him, and this too at a very early stage of his literary executorship. Could it be that he assumed this office for the sake of gratifying some private enmity, while professing to do so under the guise of friendship? You ask about the correspondence that passed between Mr. Pabodie & Dr. Griswold, after the publication of Pabodie's article in the Tribune. The day after its appearance, Dr. Griswold wrote a very intemperate & unmanly letter to Pabodie, threatening that if the letter was not withdrawn he would do very dreadful things — that he would not suffer any assertion of facts made in his “Memoir” to be contradicted with impunity, etc., etc. Mr. Pabodie corroborated his Tribune article by so simple & plain a statement (not only in relation to the charge answered in the Tribune, but to the story of an alleged conversation held with a New York lady, which is associated with the story of outrages committed at the house of a New England lady, &c.) that Dr. Griswold was silenced & remained thereafter discreetly passive and non-resistant.

I would send you the correspondence, but the charges made against Mrs. Clemm in G[riswold]'s letter are so monstrous & so malevolent that I should be sorry to have them seen by one who knew her only through this scandalous letter.

Judge Parsons directed my attention to the enclosed extract from a leading authority in a work on Medical Jurisprudence, Philadelphia, 1855.

[Letter is incomplete]

[Enclosure]

Wharton & Stille cite “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” & “The Mystery of Marie Roget” as the most remarkable illustrations in our literature of the value of the inductive process as applied to the work of drawing from mechanical & physical indices the truth which underlies them & regard the early death of the author & the causes which diverted his genius from the severer branches of study as a serious national loss.