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[155] d [Epistolary Comments on Fuller in 1852] Sarah Helen Whitman Sarah Helen Whitman to William Ellery Channing the Younger, [1852] I too read it [Memoirs] with deep interest and profound attention, hoping at last to know Margaret and do her justice—but in vain I sought to solve the problem of a nature so complex—when she speaks of the loneliness of her life, her sorrows and conflicts (as on Thanksgiving day and other periods of depressing and desolating sadness) and of the divine consolation and the heaven-born courage that compensated and crowned those periods of gloom, I felt for her a tender sympathy mingled with adoration and respect. When I saw her patient and pitying love for her little brother born on her birthday—her love for the little E[ugene]. and the little boy, and for her own little boy whose presence was to fill the heaven with joy—redeem her own heart forever from its loneliness, I was ready to forget all her faults, but old memories still come back to obscure this fair impression, yet on the whole I think I know her better and admire her more than I did before Sarah Helen Power Whitman (1803–1878) was a poet who spent all but five years of her life in Providence, Rhode Island. She married attorney John Winslow Whitman (1798–1833) in 1828, moving with him to Boston but returning to Providence upon his death. Whitman is primarily remembered today as the woman to whom Poe became briefly engaged after the death of his wife, Virginia; one of his “To Helen” poems was written for her. She later published Edgar Poe and His Critics (1860) and supplied Poe’s English biographer , John H. Ingram, with much information for his work. Whitman corresponded with Fuller about art, literature, and current events, including local gossip. The two moved in the same social circles in Providence, and Whitman joined a private class in German that Fuller was teaching. Writing to Emerson in 1839, Fuller mentioned receiving a letter from Whitman, “which I think so good that I would send it to you if there were not so many compliments that it would make you quite faint and ill” (3 June 1839, Letters, 2:69). fuller in her own time [156] I read the book. Some passages called up a train of associations which it was pleasant to revive on page 191 of Vol. I. She speaks of a Christ by Raphael which brought Christianity more home to her heart than ever did sermons. I remember the walk we took together one golden afternoon in the autumn of 1838. I spoke to her of those engravings which belonged to a friend of mine then recently returned from Italy, and she made an appointment to see them at my house—I was to borrow them for her. She brought James Freeman Clarke with her, and I read to her while she looked at them, the description of an old French writer of the last century. I remember her amusing remarks about the deity in the square velvet cap and her delight at the free out-of-door bare-footed life of the ladies in the picture of Apollo and the Muses. The owner of these pictures, Mr. Dorrance, afterwards went with Margaret, Ellen and me to one of my favorite spots in the woods—a place for mid-summer night’s dream—sheltered and shadowy and full of nooks and banks and long dim vistas. On our way, Margaret sat down in what seemed to me a bleak place to look at a wide open landscape that had no attraction for my eye. I thought “if she is enchanted here, what will she think of my glen.” But to my regret she could see nothing but dead leaves and damp earth where I saw so much beauty. Each of us was blind to what most charmed the other. If I should meet her in that world to which she had ascended we should I doubt not exchange friendly greetings, but our homes would lie far apart in remote quarters in the spiritual kingdom. . . . John Grier Varner, “Sarah Helen Whitman: Seeress of Providence” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Virginia, 1940), 169–70. ...

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