Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 039: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Apr. 10, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 114-117 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 114, continued:]

39. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 143

My dear Mr. Ingram,

I cannot let tomorrow's steamer go without taking you a brief word from me, though I have nothing new of importance. I have not yet received the copies of Graham's of which I spoke in my last letter.

I have written to Wm. D. O’Connor, who wrote the notice of my little book in the Philadelphia Post, about “the Northern Monthly” & have sent him your paper in the Mirror. He has more literary influence than [page 115:] any other writer of like independence that I know. He knows, too, & is known by, many English writers of the period, especially those who have taken much interest in his eccentric friend, Walt Whitman. O’Connor wrote an eloquent defence of him under the title of The Good Grey Poet, which received high praise. I wish you would write to him. He is terribly oppressed by his work in the Treasury Department, but he may be able to help you. He is a near & dear friend of mine, & if his health permits, I think he will do so. His address is: Wm. D. O’Connor, Treasury Department, Lighthouse Board, Washington, D.C.(1)

The only reason that I did not write to him sooner is that I have heard from his brother-in-law, Dr. Wm. Channing, son of the celebrated clergyman of that name, that O’C was very unwell & greatly out of spirits.

A few years after Poe's death, while he was a young man of 19, he sought my acquaintance, & we have since been the nearest & dearest of friends.

Pabodie is dead, as you will have seen from a former letter. I hope Mr. Latto's letter from Poe, which I gave him & which I mailed to you, has long ere this arrived safely, with the copies of the Broadway Journal. It will be too bad if anything should prevent. Let me know as soon as possible. I am anxious to know if the printed letter describing a conversation with [Walter] Savage Landor reached you, & the printed notice of S.H.W., Mrs. Osgood, & Miss Lynch, from Poe's lecture on the New England or American poetesses in Lowell.

I shall have much to tell you hereafter, which I cannot now speak of — oh, I found the “keys” for which I had been hunting: they were in the 220th note (CCXX) [of Poe's “Marginalia”], about DeFoe's Crusoe.

Poor Pabodie committed suicide just after he had, through the death of a brother, come into possession of a hundred thousand dollars. He died in Oct. 1870.

5 p.m. — I have just got your letters of 24th & 25th March. I am curious to know about Allibone's “sanctimonious remarks” — curious to know whatever you know about Mrs. St. Leon Loud.

The Boston Commonwealth of Saturday has the following item: “Mr. William F. Gill will give a special course of dramatic readings at Parker Memorial Hall on Wednesday, April 15 & 22.” Our friend still lives, but I fancy has not yet completed his lecture on Poe. Meantime, a young gentleman who sought an introduction to me as a friend of Mr. Gill's, spent an evening with me night before last & spoke of his friend in the most exalted terms as a young man of wonderful genius & an enthusiastic believer in the great poet.

I confess my heart warmed toward him and I was almost persuaded [page 116:] to believe in the possibility that he would someday set to work, as he says, on his defence [of Poe].

I send you two or three slips from O’Connor's letters that you may judge something of his calibre. If anything he has said of Poe will be of any use to you, I can authorize you to use or quote it. He did not know Poe personally, but I doubt not was often unconsciously inspired by him. His devotion to me seems hardly intelligible on any other grounds.

Good night.

I do not know whether you are acquainted with the last verse of “Ulalume” as originally printed. Poe omitted it at my suggestion, in a copy which he prepared for publication in the Providence Journal, with the above heading, & it is so printed in all the subsequent collections. He agreed with me that the penultimate verse made a more effective ending.

Yesterday I went to the Providence Athenaeum Library & found the original version in the American Whig Review, edited by Colton. I copied from it the verse, in pencil, for you. At the bottom of the page I found Poe's autograph in pencil. It recalled to me a circumstance which I had entirely forgotten.

“Ulalume” was published without signature & an anonymous copy had floated to me in some newspaper. I was strangely impressed with its weird imagery & vainly questioned everybody likely to have heard of it. One morning, being with Poe at the Athenaeum, I asked him if he had ever seen the poem & could tell me who wrote it. To my infinite surprise, he told me that he himself was the author. Turning to a bound volume of the Review which was in the alcove where we were sitting, he wrote his name at the bottom, and I saw it again yesterday, after an interval of more than 24 years.

The Athenaeum has been enlarged since those days & the Whig [page 117:] Reviews are now in a remote corner of the building, on an upper gallery; otherwise the autograph might have been abstracted.

 

1. William Douglas O’Connor (1832-1889) was an occasional author who spent most of his career as an editor of the Saturday Evening Post, and later in various Washington bureaucratic jobs, rising finally to the post of librarian in the U.S. Treasury Department. His strong defense of Walt Whitman, The Good Grey Poet, a Vindication (New York: Bunce & Huntingdon) was published in 1866. So “near and dear a friend” did he remain to Mrs. Whitman that when she wrote out her autograph will on May 30, 1878, she left to him the sum of $100, “for his sole use forever.”