Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 061: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, July 21, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 190-194 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 190, continued:]

61. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 163

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Your letter of July 6 came yesterday & made my heart so glad, but what you tell me of your illness in the Isle of Wight makes me still very anxious. Had you ever such an attack before your last illness?

I have been suffering greatly from languor since I wrote you, but your letters always bring me back to life. A letter from O’C[onnor] this morning, the first received from him in three weeks, asks if this Erl-King of the skies, the comet, with his “crown & tail,” has anything to do with this extraordinary weather which so prostrates & paralyses everybody. He has read your Temple Bar article in the Eclectic & likes it, “as far as it goes,” but thinks you are not savage enough on “Griswold's villainies.” But O’Connor, with the blood of Brian Born & Roderick O’Connor, “King of all Ireland,” in his veins, is too intensely belligerent and too fond of a free fight to be a safe critic in such matters. He is deeply interested in your work. He will try to find out something about Miss Rosalie Poe & Mr. Powell. He has been very ill, & greatly confined by his duties as librarian, famished among books [page 191:] which he has no time to read. Mr. Gill, it seems, by the cutting from the Commonwealth, is again “fairly at work,” as he wrote me last spring, when he hoped to complete his lecture in fifteen days. Rather surprising, is it not, that your letter written so long ago should have just turned up?

You may remember that Emerson, in his poem of Uriel, speaks of a word, or

So will it be, I fancy, with your book. Griswold's ghost may, as you surmise, still be brewing mischief. Yesterday a young M.D. who worships Poe, as all young men of culture & imagination do, sent me a copy of the New York Commercial Advertiser showing that the demons are greatly stirred in Baltimore. Strange that three editors should be thus roused by the renewed interest in their great poet. Perhaps they only represent the three heads of one surly Cerberus. Could it be the Mr. Neilson Poe, who still represents the family of “De la Poer” in Baltimore? Did I tell you in my last letter that Poe told me, in speaking of his family name, that the relative of whom his grandfather spoke was called the Chevalier L’Poer in some family record & was there or elsewhere, spoken of as a friend of the Marquis de Grammont?

I have a memory which vaguely retains dates & statistics — the letter is apt to escape me, but the spirit is indelible. Now, when convinced of my relationship to Poe, I endowed him with all my ancestral honors.

I believe I told you of the strange resemblance which my father's sister, Mrs. Rebecca Power Tillinghast, wife of the Hon. J. L. Tillinghast, M.C., saw to my father in the face of Mr. George Poe of Georgetown, D.C., & during the spring of 1849, when my mother once saw me in the dress of an Albanian chief, worn for a tableau, she was so appalled by my resemblance to Poe that she would not remain in the room or give me a second look. Everyone who had seen Poe remarked the resemblance. The aid of a burnt cork to the eyebrows & applied as a mustache on the upper lip, transformed me. The resemblance was magical.

Do you remember Byron's lines

Have you read an article in Saint Paul's in Nov. & Dec., 1873, on “Byron & his Times,” by Roden Noel? Very just & noble I think in its critical & moral estimate of the man & the poet. Who is Roden Noel?(1) [page 192:]

Last Wednesday I saw for the first time a copy of the edition of Poe's poems for 1831. How does it happen, I wonder, that in the three verses which I marked in the poem now called “Lenore,” the word “Helen” occurs, while in the edition of 1831, from which you quote “The Paean,” it does not occur. I do not remember whether the poems, as quoted in the pages of a Southern Review which I sent you, gave the date of the edition. Can you tell me?

The copy which I saw for the first time last week was shown me by Mr. Harris, who had obtained it after much search at a booksale in New York. He has sought for many years for the edition said to be published in 1827, but can find, as yet, no trace of it.

He distinctly recollects having seen somewhere an incidental allusion to a vol. of poems called Tamerlane, published in Boston by “a Bostonian,” in 1827. He thinks that this must be the edition of 1827, it being unlikely that two editions of Poe's poems should be published the same year. I gave him the proof sheets of your article on the poems in The Gentleman's Magazine, as I had another copy in the Every Saturday. I also gave him your address. He is an ardent & indefatigable collector of American poetry — a man of wealth & culture & with a superabundance of leisure.(2)

He is just about to leave the city for the mountains & may be absent til September. He brought me a copy of James Hannay's Poetical Works of E A.P., with a Notice of his Life & Writings. I had seen extracts from the Life, but had never seen the volume. Of course you have seen it, as it was published in London in 1853. I like much of the life, especially the two last pages of his critique on Poe's writings. Some of the illustrations, too, are very good, but “Helen” in the garden is very — conventional & commonplace. Don’t you think so? But not so bad as Pickersgill's in the Illustrated Redfield of 1858.(3)

Mr. Harris had never seen the Wiley & Putnam edition of Tales & Poems published in 1845, from which I cut the Index & Preface for you. This is a copy of an edition he has been long anxious to possess, but which is, it seems, difficult to obtain. I told him that I had cut from the book the Index & Preface, which you were to return to me after using. At this he opened his eyes in such undisguised amazement & reproach that I recognized the infatuation of a book collector, as never before: “This book — a gift from Poe — a presentation copy — containing his autograph — and I had cut out a leaf!!” To appease him, I promised to give him the book that he might preserve it from further spoiliation. So when you can, you will return me the page I sent you & I will then place the book in his hands for safe keeping. All this sprang from his seeing in the Providence Journal the paragraph about your books from the Examiner and Academy. [page 193:]

I found in Appleton's Journal of Literature, Science, & Art, for July 18, an article with an illustration about Poe's house at Fordham, by M. J. Lamb.(4) I shall mail the Journal to you with my letter this evening. This morning I received a copy of the Journal from Davidson, but no letter. He is apparently very busy. I think the writer is wrong about the four windows to the parlor. You said in one of your later letters that in case I should ever republish Edgar Poe & His Critics you would like to suggest to me a few alterations & omissions. I should be very glad to receive any suggestion from you on the subject. Be sure to tell me when you write.

On the 93rd page of Appleton's Journal you will find among the literary notes a quotation from Leslie Stephen in Fraser's about Poe & Hawthorne, suggested I fancy by Eugene Benson's article in the Galaxy, a portion of which I copied for you. But the author in this case praises Hawthorne & disparages Poe, in a way which looks like malice prepense. Read it. Who is Leslie Stephen?(5)

I think I foresee that stories of Poe, anecdotes, fabulous & otherwise, will abound for some time to come.

Your answer to the Temperance man is well done, but I think your denial of the cause of separation between us, as stated by Griswold, is rather too strongly stated. If I had never seen Poe intoxicated, I should never have consented to marry him; had he kept his promise never again to taste wine, I should never have broken the engagement.

I wrote you not long before your illness an account of the scenes & incidents referred to in Poe's letter, “The agonies which I have lately endured, etc.,” but pressing questions from you which required immediate answers caused me to leave the story unfinished. Some day I will resume it & you will understand what I mean by saying had I never seen him intoxicated I should never have consented to marry him, but goodbye now.

Your friend ever & forever,

 

1. Roden Berkeley Wriothesley Noel (1834-1894), an English poet and relative of Lord Byron, published Life of Byron in 1870 as part of the Great Writers Series.

2. Caleb Fiske Harris (1818-1881) was a merchant, ardent bibliophile, neighbor, and devoted friend as well as literary executor to Mrs. Whitman. He drowned in Moosehead Lake, Maine, on Oct. 2, 1881, and his large and very important collection of rare books, including many first editions of early American poetry and drama, eventually came to the Brown University Library.

3. For Pickersgill see p. 34, n. 3.

4. “Poe's House at Fordham,” Appleton's, 12 (1874), 75-77. Item 579 in the Ingram Poe Collection.

5. Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), English critic, biographer, and editor of Cornhill Magazine in 1871. He edited the first twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary of National [page 194:] Biography (1885-1891), conjointly with Sir Sidney Lee, beginning in 1890. Virginia Woolf was one of his two daughters.