Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 077: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Dec. 13, 1874,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 233-235 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 233, continued:]

77. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 188

My dear Mr. Ingram,

Yesterday I received your very interesting letter of November 27th & must try to send you a few words in reply by tonight's mail. The papers I read with interest & will refer to hereafter. I will try at least to answer some of your questions tonight. I doubt if Mrs. Botta could furnish you [page 234:] with copies of Poe's notes or letters. She applied to me, you know, for an autograph (even a few words) or a signature, simply, for the volume of autographs she has so long been industriously collecting. She may, however, give you some interesting information concerning him.

Mrs. Oakes Smith has written a sketch of him which was published in some periodical edited by herself & her son, Appleton Oakes Smith.(1)

I believe I have a copy of it, as republished in the Journal of Health. If I have, I will send it to you. It adds nothing to the facts, & introduces some apocryphal conversations which Poe is said to have held with her in relation to the influence which I might have had on him had he known me & herself earlier. I feel confident that no such conversation ever took place. Mrs. Smith is very imaginative &, I think, apt to rely on her imagination for her facts. With this exception, there is much to love & praise & admire in her. I think in writing of Poe as she did she suffered her fancy to take the place of her memory. I have been looking for her article since I wrote the last lines, but cannot find it. She will send it to you, I doubt not, if you write to her. I will tell you more about our relations another time. I believe she felt hurt with me about a letter which she asked me to write in behalf of her son Appleton, who was charged with some state offense, as engaging in the slave trade. I said to the authorities what she wished me to say, with the exception of giving my own testimony to his character as an honorable gentleman, which I could not do with truth, as my acquaintance with him was very slight. After that our correspondence, which had been friendly & affectionate (for I sincerely loved her), ceased altogether. I have passed many happy hours in her society. We visited Niagara Falls together, & in 1868 we rode together to the top of Mount Washington on the mountain ponies then used in that perilous ascent.

Speaking of your book with Mr. Bartlett, he gave me for you the address of Mr. Wellford, his former partner of whom I wrote in my last letter. He thinks Mr. Wellford might give you some valuable information in relation to Poe's career in New York.

Mr. Harris is now in New York & intends making a final inquest for the 1827 edition of poems, which he knows by authentic evidence was actually published. Of this more hereafter.

Don’t speak to anyone of what I have said about my “imaginative” friend, E.O.S.

I well remember Mrs. Nichols and her book, Mary Lindsey — I think that was the name of the book — in which she speaks of E.A.P.(2) I have not seen her since she came to see me in the winter of 1846, with my eccentric friend, Dr. Max Edgeworth Lazarus.(3) Mrs. Gove was dfine clairvoyant and diagnosed diseases with an almost infallible intuition. She was at that time at the head of a water-cure establishment in New [page 235:] York. I was greatly impressed by her intuitive or clairvoyant power, & I afterward read her book entitled Mary Lindsey with great interest as an autobiographical history. I think she may have it in her power to tell you much of Poe. I am very glad to know what you tell me about the sonnet to M.L.S. having been addressed to Mrs. Houghton. Mrs. Nichols can tell you something about Anna Blackwell, the lady who spent two or three weeks with Mrs. Clemm at Fordham.

How do you think the letters sent to me from Charlottesville came to give the date as Feb. 19, instead of January! Did Poe write it Jan. 19, or did they find it out & alter the record?

Have you seen Stoddard's Preface to the new edition of the poems? It is not altered for the better — certainly not in spirit, & a review of it in the New York Tribune is full of venom. Gill in the Lotus Leaves has done better than I anticipated. Have you seen it?(4) The portrait prefixed to Stoddard's vol. is very bad — a gross caricature — not so well executed as the one in Harper's. Dr. A. H. Okie, who met Poe at my mother's house on the day when he was so much excited, the period to which he refers in the facsimile you have given, said to me yesterday, on seeing the portrait in your book, “It is very good, the best I have seen, but a little rigid & not so handsome as Poe was.” Yet Dr. Okie saw him when but partially recovered from that “wild weird dream,” that “clime, out of space, out of time” which Poe has so well described.

Poe stayed on different visits to the city at different hotels. The last was the Earl House. Both have been demolished for new buildings a number of years ago. Who is Dr. Hand Browne? I shall look for the Academy's notice. The Spectator's I shall not be likely to see.

I must leave much unsaid two or three days longer, when I shall write again. “Great is the truth & it shall prevail.” May heaven bless & prosper you. You will see that I am writing in desperate hurry, & overlook all.

Ever your friend.

 

1. This is probably inaccurate. The four sons of Seba and Elizabeth Oakes Smith bought Emerson's United States Magazine in 1858, changing its name to Emerson's Magazine and Putnam's Monthly; Appleton Oakes Smith became publisher, Seba Smith, editor. Financial difficulties forced them to suspend publication, but they started again in January 1859 with the Great Republic Monthly, Seba and Elizabeth Oakes Smith listed as editors. That publication lasted only until November 1859.

2. The name of Mrs. Nichols’ book was Mary Lyndon, or Revelations of a Life (New York: Stringer and Townsend, 1855).

3. Dr. Max Edgeworth Lazarus was author of books on hygiene, Zoroastrianism, and psychology.

4. William Fearing Gill, “Edgar Allan Poe,” in Lotos Leaves (Boston: W. F. Gill and Co., 1875), pp. 279-306.