Text: John C. Miller, ed., “Entry 169: Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram, Feb. 2, 1877,” Poe's Helen Remembers (1979), pp. 470-471 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 470, continued:]

169. Sarah Helen Whitman to John H. Ingram. Item 313

My dear MacRaven,

Your of the 18th Ulto. just received. I sent you a copy of Didier's “Memoir” etc., on the 12th January. I hope it arrived safely. I will write at once to Davidson to countermand your order for a copy from Widdleton.

I believe he, Didier, intends writing a separate work on the subject. When all the evidence is in & fairly sifted we can judge better of its value. I was greatly surprised, in truth, at the two statements to which you refer. He seems to have been in correspondence with Neilson Poe, & surely he must know. Yet I believe the story as told by Didier has not been publicly contradicted. It throws a weird glamour over the romance of Poe's life, which seems never fully to emerge from “The Demon of the Shadow” which so dominated his imagination.

When I said I did not like the Bruckmann copies of your photograph, I referred to the small ones only. The other is superb. Do you not find that the large portrait has a quite different expression from the other? Mr. Coleman, who remembers Poe & who owns the daguerreotype from which the copy I sent you was taken, thinks the large one the best ever published of him. But in the smaller pictures the resemblance is somehow strangely altered or left out; the corners of the mouth, on which so much depends, are specially wanting in vraisemblance. Compare them with the engraving in your book & tell me which is the more characteristic of the man.

I hear nothing of late in relation to Gill's book. I fancy he is waiting till we know under what king we are to serve, & until business returns to its accustomed channels.

Lathrop is assistant editor of the Atlantic. He married Rose Hawthorne. Her brother, Julian Hawthorne, is very much incensed at his publication of a private journal which the great novelist or tale writer would have suppressed.(1)

Yes, I have read Swinburne's noble rebuke of Carlyle's barbarous & brutal policy. It is not less admirable in tone & temper than in the relentless truth of its brave utterances. There is nothing like it in the language. How will Carlyle endure his life after it? Will he not wear sackcloth & ashes for the rest of his dishonored days? [page 471:]

I wish you had told me in what number of the Academy was to be found the notice of the photograph. Can you think that a portrait or face so serene & noble as that from which the life-size Bruckmann portrait was taken could in less than a year have become, as you say, worn & haggard like the face in the Baltimore Memorial? I think it more likely that the fault was in the printing of the photo.

The Raven [Le Corbeau] has at last arrived & wherever he puts in an appearance the page is nobly illustrated, but in one of the etchings we see only what passes for his shadow on the floor. This is something out of the range of my appreciation.

But two of the illustrations grow upon me every time I look at them — the one where he is seen swooping toward the window of the poet, & the other where he sits enthroned in shadows on the bust of Pallas. These two flank the portrait you sent me and add a new interest & lend a new character to my “Hall of Dreams.”

When you come to Providence you will see them there if I, myself, am there to welcome you.

I have many questions to ask, but must wait till next time.

Semper Idem. Your Providence of Providence,

 

1. George Parsons Lathrop edited and published A Study of Hawthorne (Boston: J. R. Osgood and Co., 1876) in which he quotes from Hawthorne's English Notebooks.