Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 051: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, May 11, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 152-155 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 152:]

51. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 153

My dear Mr. Ingram,

I have been very anxious about your health — almost afraid to write — lest anything I might say should feed the intense action of your mind, which so much needs rest. I know the fine temper of the steel, but I fear the wearing of the scabbard. For my sake — for the sake of all who love you — for your work's sake, do not overtask your mind. Do not fear that anything which can be written on the subject can forestall your work.

I do not think Stoddard intends anything more than a republication of his article in Harper's, perhaps in the Bric-a-Brac Series, which I saw for the first time announced in this morning's Journal. I enclose the advertisement. Of course Poe & Hawthorne will be among his “famous people.” By the way, that extract from the Season, over the signature of Eugene Benson, is only a part of an article published in the Galaxy, December 1868, entitled “Poe & Hawthorne.”(1) It is a subtle & admirable analysis of the comparative attributes & merits of the two writers. I will quote for you a few sentences:

Poe & Hawthorne are two brilliant exceptions in American literature. Among Americans they are the only two literary men who have had the sense of beauty & the artist's conscience in a supreme degree. They belonged to the haughty & reserved aristocracy of letters. Hawthorne was like a magician hidden from the world, creating his beautiful phantasms: Poe was like a banished spirit, abased among men, exercising an intellect, & drawing upon a memory, that implied a clearer & higher state of being than that of material & common life. His mental perspicacity & unerringness suggest a super-mortal quality, & make the simple narrative of “The Gold Bug” appalling; for you will remark that the sentiment of strangeness & terror which it begets is excited without any of Poe's usual resources — that is, of death or murder in any form. One is appalled by the precision of the intellect revealed, which is unmatched by any English story writer. But is because of the beauty that Poe created, because of his admirable style, the pure & strange elements of his nature, his general & minute method, rather than because of his puzzles, or curious intellectual inventions, that he is a type of exquisite & brilliant genius. The interest of his inventions would be exhausted at the first reading, if they were not set before us with a fine literary art that charms even while it is the medium of the exceptional, & often of the repugnant.

Very few persons have a definite idea of the difference between the unique & unrivalled genius of these two men, Poe & Hawthorne, who still had, positive, if hidden, bonds of sympathy with each other, while they were radically different in their work & in the springs of their beings. Both had an exquisite sense of the music of thought; both loved the mysterious & the [page 153:] bizarre; both labored to paint the exceptional & dominate our intellects with an intimate sense of the spiritual & the unseen. They were alike splendidly endowed with imagination, but Poe had more invention — in fact a most marvellous faculty of invention — & he was the more purely intellectual of the two. His intellect was direct, inevitable, & unerring; Hawthorne's was indirect, easily turned from its object, & seemingly purposeless; Poe's always seemed instinct with intense purpose. Hawthorne would have preferred to hide all his processes of creation, happy in evoking beautiful figures, but with no desire to let you see how he did it. Poe, like all inventors, took pains to let you see the process of his mind; he laid bare his mechanism, took his listener, step by step, with him, well aware that he must admire a skill & ingenuity so superior to all he had known.

I will try to get the magazine for you.

I told you that in my next letter that I would tell you what I had to say about the volume of Graham's for 1842. There is no title page to the first six numbers of the year 1842 — nothing to show the name or names of the editors, but in the title page of the last six, from July to Jan. the name of Griswold appears with that of Graham. The only articles bearing Poe's name in the vol. are “Autographs: an Appendix,” “A Few Words About Brainard,” “To One Departed,” “Life in Death” (a story I had not before seen, very fine in weird, descriptive power), “The Masque of the Red Death,” & “The Poetry of Rufus Dawes.” The Appendix to “Autographs” is the same as the one I sent you.

Do not fear that anything you have written to me will ever be seen by another. No eyes but mine have seen a single line of your letters, with the exception of a list of questions, which I sent to Davidson & which he asked leave to retain until he could make further inquiries.

Whenever there is anything in your letters which I think will interest my sister, I read it to her, but she has never read any of your letters. When I asked you to say something pleasant about “Cinderella” & “Sleeping Beauty,” it was with no idea of your saying anything about them to the public, but simply in your letter to me. She is very jealous of her claim to these poems, which she thinks has been made subsidiary to mine.

Yet, when I read to her what you said about them, & about noticing them at some future time in some paper or magazine, she said if you should ever do so, she wished to have my name associated with hers, but hers ought to come first — to which I assented most heartily. It is difficult to give entire satisfaction, & yet I have tried so hard to do so.

All this entre nous & the proverbial post.

Just after commencing the foregoing pages I received yours of the [page 154:] 28th Ultimo. You have seen Mrs. Lewis. Oh, how I wish you could obtain from her permission to copy the daguerreotype, even though it may be too late for the volume, the first edition of the Life. Is it a full or a three-quarter view, & has it ever been photographed? Did she tell you when it was taken, in what city? I wish you could obtain her permission to have it photographed.

You say that she does not like Mrs. Clemm. Did she tell you why? Did you ask her about Dunn English & the libel suit, & about Mrs. Ellet? Or was her acquaintance with Poe of a more recent date? Did she know anything of Mrs. Shelton, or of Poe's sister? Don’t answer my questions while you are so busy — don’t ever write at all, if it is “a pain & a weariness.”

I hope you will get my copy of Geo. Graham's “Letter to Willis” in time to use it. I think it is, as a faithful indication of character, worth all that has been said of him from those who knew him personally, more genuine, earnest, & true-hearted even, than the sketches of Willis & Mrs. Osgood, both of which had a savor of self-glorification in them. This of Graham's is evidently warm from the heart. Mr. Gill told me that the publisher of a Boston paper who had had business relations with Poe told him that Poe was always true to his word; he used some very forcible current phrase, which I have forgotten, to express his sense of Poe's honorable dealing in money matters. I have heard nothing of late from Mr. Gill & despair of getting back Mr. Willis’ letter, which I gave him. I suppose that he has not answered your letter.

Mr. Eveleth has not answered the letter I wrote in reply to his first letter announcing a letter from you. I fancy it would be difficult for him to get at his papers, which he left at home in Phillips [Maine].

You say that Mrs. Lewis's letters from Poe were short. I think he was not in the habit of writing long letters. He told me that he had never in his life written letters so long as those he had written to me. And soon after Mrs. Osgood learned from some of Poe's friends in New York that we were engaged, she came to Providence on purpose to see me & learn the truth of the rumor. She was deeply interested in him, but they had had no intercourse with each other either by letter or otherwise, after the affair of which I told you, the demand for a return of letters.

In her interview with me, she told me that she had always known that we, he & I, should once meet, the influence of each on the other would be inevitable & enduring. She threw herself at my feet & covered my hands with tears & kisses; she told me all the enthusiasm that she had felt for him & her unchanged & unchanging interest in him & his best welfare. In answer to her questions, I told her of the [page 155:] poem which he had sent me of his visit to Providence, of his letters, & of all that she wished to know. When I spoke of the letters of ten or twelve pages, she seemed almost incredulous. She said his letters to her were all very brief, were in fact mere notes filled with expressions of devoted friendship & admiration, but very brief. I have longed to know if he ever wrote to another as he has written to me. Mrs. Clemm wrote me that Mrs. Shelton had not in her possession any fragment of his writing. If Mrs. Lewis & Mrs. Osgood had not, I must believe that he departed from his usual habit in writing as he did to me.

I told him all that Mrs. Osgood had said in his praise, told him of her confession of mingled joy & sorrow in hearing of our engagement.

After our parting & estrangement I think he turned with grateful remembrance to her image, and I think he wrote of her in such words of emphatic praise in his notice of Griswold's Female Poets, & of me in terms of such cold negation, to show his gratitude to her & his indifference to me.

I know, too, how this act of petulance must, afterwards, have reproached him when he saw my verses and have prompted him to convey to me the expression of his reconciliation & remembrance in the poem of “Annabel Lee.” But, as I told you before, this assurance is for you alone.

It was on his second or third visit to Providence that he brought with him the MS. of the lecture delivered in Lowell, & called my attention to the passage in relation to Mrs. Osgood, Miss Lynch, & Mrs. Whitman. I asked him for a copy, which he gave me, saying, “I shall have something much better than this to say, Helen, when my notice of Griswold's book comes out.”

In that notice I was classed with three or four others, I think, as among the most “accomplished.”

And now I bid you once more remember, dear friend, to take time and rest.

Do not fear that anybody can forestall your destined & appointed work. You have done nobly, & must succeed.

Tell me if you like my “Proserpine.”

Goodbye.

P.S. Harper's Monthly, March 1872, has woodcuts of Virginia University. If you can see it & think they would be useful, I will try to procure a copy.

I knew about the “tomb,” but thought it was in a cemetery. I have been reading the “Eulogium” again. The critical part is admirable, I think.

 

1. Eugene Benson, “Poe and Hawthorne,” Galaxy, 7 (1868), 742-48.