Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 040: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Apr. 14, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 117-118 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 117, continued:]

40. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 144

My dear Mr. Ingram,

I hoped when I last wrote you that I should be able to give in my next definite answers to some of your questions. I think I told you that I had written to my friend Wm. D. O’Connor. Yesterday morning I received the enclosed lines from him, promising that he would write “fully on Sunday.” I looked anxiously for his Sunday letter, hoping that it might contain something of interest for you that I might be able to forward in the present letter. But it has not yet come. If you had only a little more time! I spoke in my last [Apr. 10] of O’Connor's friendship for Walt Whitman, who is so much admired by Tennyson, Rossetti, & some other of the English poets. He is not of my husband's family (as you may have supposed), & I had at one time a great repugnance to his writings, but after becoming personally acquainted with him during his visit to the Channings in this city, I learned in a measure to conquer my repugnance, in view of his noble qualities of mind & heart. Still, from a copy of his poems, which he gave me, I have torn out ruthlessly a third of the book.

Yesterday, in looking for some notice of O’Connor's Good Grey Poet, which is mentioned, I find, only in a notice of W.W.'s writings, I turned to Allibone's notice of Poe. It was certainly contributed by some deadly enemy. And his reference to his engagement with “a New England lady,” which I had only read carelessly before (if, indeed, I had read it at all, which I begin to doubt), was more venomous & insulting than even Griswold's gross fabrication. I remember, now, that Mr. Latto alluded to this passage (quoting it) in one of his letters, & regretted that some one who knew me had not furnished him with a more reliable notice.

In my next letter I will try to give you an account of our last interview, & you will then see how great an injustice has been done to him — how gratuitous and unmanly an insult to me! I wish it were [page 118:] possible to discover the author of this libel. But I must try to be calm till this sad story is elucidated — so far, at least, as my words have the power to elucidate it.

Don’t neglect to return Mr. Latto's letter — the autograph letter from Poe to Pabodie, as soon as convenient. Did I tell you that you might use the portion of Poe's letter about “Arcturus” if you thought proper to do so?

You ask me to send you a photograph. The only photographs I ever sat for were some little profile views, unskillfully printed, which were taken in 1862 at an establishment in Broadway. On my return to Providence, my sister chanced to see them, & finding that I was about to destroy them on account of an unshapely bonnet, which, after the fashion of the period, was worn far back on the head, she begged me to let her costume the head so as to hide the bonnet, which she did with such success by a coiffure of crowns, helmets, & cowls, as to please so many of my friends that I was induced to have them reprinted with these adornments cut from illustrated newspapers & magazines, etc. I send you one of these, which you will perceive is a piece of composite art.

If you care to keep either of them, send me back the one you don’t want. There are two fine oil paintings of me, one by C. G. Thompson, a brother-in-law of Mrs. Ritchie, & somewhat overpraised by Hawthorne in his Italian Notes as the finest painter of character in America. There is also another more recently taken — perhaps good photographs can be taken from them — we will see.(1)

But now, for the present, “Vale”

 

1. The painting of Mrs. Whitman by Cephas Giovanni Thompson (1809-1888) was executed in 1838, when she was thirty-five years old. At her death she willed it to Brown University. The second portrait was painted by John Nelson Arnold (1834-1909) in 1868-69, in Mrs. Whitman's sixty-sixth year, and willed by her to be presented at her executors’ discretion to either the Providence Athenaeum Library or the Rhode Island Historical Society. Through error her executors, Caleb Fiske Harris and Dr. William F. Channing, sent the Thompson painting to the Athenaeum Library in 1884, where it now hangs in a frame which came from Gilbert Stuart, in their Art Room, beautiful to see. The Arnold painting, after hanging in the artist's studio in Providence for nearly forty years after its completion, was given to Brown University, and it now hangs in the Caleb Fiske Harris Room of the John Hay Special Collections Library of the Brown University Library. Neither library has seen fit to correct the error made so long ago, and well might each be content with the painting it now has.