Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 020: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Mar. 10, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 66-68 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 66, continued:]

20. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 129

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Yesterday morning I received the Mirror for February.

Your article is admirable — incontrovertible in most of the points touched upon by you.(1)

I have only time now to tell you how much I like it & to thank you for your generous ardor in the defense of one who has been so deeply wronged. I have done what I can for the furtherance of your wishes as to Graham's, etc. Having entrusted your commissions to Mr. Davidson, I am waiting anxiously for a letter from him. I sent by last Saturday's steamer letters & photographs.

I think you must have the autograph letter I sent you ere this. I hope soon to hear of its due arrival. Let me know as soon as possible if you wish for the Broadway Journal & if it should be sent by mail or express.

In the Providence Journal of this morning I find the announcement of an illustrated poem by Mr. Gill, which I enclose.

I have heard nothing from him by letter since I last wrote you.

There are one or two trifling mistakes, which I will point out, in your articles. James Russell Lowell is not, I think, Dr. Lowell. At least he is not called so here. Mr. Wertenbaker's name is Wertenbaker & not becker, although a misprint in the letter — the printed letter — I sent you led you to think so. Mr. Pabodie's name was Wm. J. Pabodie. He is mentioned in the Appendix to Griswold's American Poets, I think. But these errors are of little consequence. [page 67:]

I enclosed in my last letter a fragment of a letter from Mr. T. C. Latto in relation to the relentless enmity of Briggs & English.(2) The letter was written three years ago, but I presume their hatred still survives. You need not return this or anything I send you without I expressly request its return.

Don’t touch upon the private history I gave you of the story about borrowed money, or, if you do, do it lightly & vaguely, without introducing names.

Mrs. Botta (Miss Anne C. Lynch) is very much afraid of being compromised socially, & likes to keep the peace with everybody. Mrs. Ellet still lives, & would doubtless be implacable towards anybody who should tell the true story of the affair. I imagine, however, that her interest in the matter, her interference, was simply a point of literary rivalry, rather than personal.(3)

If I copy for you the letters of E.A.P. of which I spoke in my last, you will see in one of them another allusion to this matter.

In the vol. of poems which I sent you there are three sonnets addressed to Mrs. Browning, the 2nd & 3rd of which [contain] allusions to her poem of the “Fugitive Slave,” published soon after the passing of the Fugitive Slave Bill in the U.S. Congress in the summer of 1850.

The whole North was roused by the aggressions of the slave-holding power, and it was in allusion to her poem & to the passage of this law that the last of the three sonnets was written. The thought in the sonnet is not clearly expressed, as it stands; after the first seven lines, it should read:

I like the sonnets so well that I would have them as clear in meaning as I can make them.

And now I must once more thank you & bless you for the words you have spoken —

I send you copies of two printed articles which may interest you through their allusion to names with which you are already acquainted. I will write by Saturday's steamer.

Mr. Poe's article on Wm. Ellery Channing was not less amusing than true.(4) Yet you will see that I can appreciate the poet, while I cannot but [page 68:] laugh with his critic. Poe made a mistake in thinking that the Wm. Ellery of whom he speaks was the son of the distinguished clergyman of that name. He was his nephew, the son of his cousin, the late Dr. Walter Channing of Boston. The poet married the sister of Margaret Fuller, but the marriage was not a happy one & they separated after a few troubled years. He has lately written his recollections of Thoreau, with selections from his writings.(5) He once addressed a poem to S.H.W., which is very characteristic.

 

1. The article referred to is “More New Facts about Edgar Allan Poe,” reprinted on pages 47-55.

2. Charles Frederick Briggs (1804-1877) was a journalist and author who had founded the Broadway Journal in New York in 1844. After Poe became a partner and for a brief time sole owner and editor of the Journal, Briggs, who was a close friend of James Russell Lowell's, joined the ranks of Poe's relentless defamers and enemies.

3. If Mrs. Ellet's interference was not personal at the time of her instigation of the defamation of Poe, it shortly thereafter became intensely so.

4. Graham's Magazine, Aug. 1843. See Works, ed. Harrison, XI, 174-90.

5. William Ellery Channing, Thoreau: The Poet Naturalist with Memorial Verses (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873).