Text: John Grier Varner, “Chapter 03,” Sarah Helen Whitman, Seeress of Providence, dissertation, 1940, pp. 66-107 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 66:]

John Winslow Whitman was now established in Boston as a lawyer; but he had never entirely given his literary aspirations, and he became one of the several anonymous editors of the Boston Spectator and Ladies’ Album, a magazine which had its beginning in 1826.(1) This connection came to be a fortunate one for Sarah Power, for it was doubtless responsible for the beginning of her literary career. Among her first publications was a poem signed Helen [[“Helen”]] in the Boston Spectator for September 22, 1827, but the title and substance of these lines suggest that the young poet intended this poem for the individual and not for the masses.

To ————

Written in an album

This poem was followed immediately by a second entitled “Woman” and also signed “Helen”, but a little editorial apology shortly afterward shows that one of the editors of the Boston Spectator had played a little too freely with “Helen's” Album:

The Boston Spectator and Ladies' Album was one of the first of the ladies’ magazines. Its editorial staff consisted of a group of young Boston males; for though female contributions were sought, ladies had not yet been invited to occupy the editorial chair. It was not until 1828 that men began to realize that perhaps “fair lady knew best the taste of lady fair”, and then condescend to place editorial responsibilities on weaker shoulders. It was in this year that Mrs.

[page 68:] Sarah Josepha Hale became editor of the Ladies’ Magazine (the first of the ladies’ magazine to last as long as five years) and thus proved that the feminine sex could do equally well, if not better, in the editorial chair.(1)

The Boston Spectator was doomed from the start, for its editors dared to show their teeth at their English literary masters. The very idea of British political or religious dominance would have snacked of treason or heresy, but Americans were yet luxuriating in English literary vassalage. There were no international copyright laws, and artistic productions were considered as spiritual creations which along with Congressional orations and musical performances were simply gifts of the best minds to the common weal.(2) Consequently there was easy access to the best of the English productions, and to all reading Americans Scott anal Bulwer came to be as essential as had been “Pilgrims Progress, and Fordyce's Sermons to their forefathers. Scott had brought romance to an America which had been slow to accept it, and by 1825 his popularity had reached such a height that even the clergy who had fiercely denounced fiction, and the Phi Beta Kappa orators who had denounced Gothic romances were willing to make of Scott an exception.(3) Byron was in the midst of his popularity, and Mrs. Hemans had become an almost indispensable [page 69:] female tonic which frequently worked with equal potency on either sex.

The Spectator resented this sheep-like attitude on the part of reading Americans. Perhaps they had this early come under the influence of the North American Review or of the fiery John Neal who had gone all the way to England and subtly pushed his “Brother Johnathan” down British throats in order to prove that there was something in America worth consumption.(1) At any rate, in December, 1827, the Spectator carried an editorial to the effect that Americans had too long been vassals to prejudiced English literary opinion, and it was now time for them to “unpin their faith from the sleeves of foreigners” and to learn to think for themselves. Mind had no particular claims and was indigenous to no one soil; and now that the American woodlands were beginning to awaken with native melody, it was time that this music was being attentively heard across the Atlantic. The flow from the East should have its return.

The Spectator had dared be a predominantly American magazine. It did not trouble to present its readers with Scott or Bulwer; and though there were occasional excerpts from foreign magazines, most of their publications came from American pens. There was very little of Felicia Hemans, and an equal dearth of her great American disciple, Mrs. Sigourney. The poetry [page 70:] was contributed chiefly by American poets who had not yet attained sufficient reputation to enable them to fling precaution or modesty to the winds and discard noms de plume. There were “Alarac” and “Ichabod”, “Boethe” and “Iole”, “Cornelia” and “Helen”, the last two being great favorites. Once when there were discussions of the editors warned that “Sweet Helen”, if wronged by “being abducted into strange journals, without naming the place from whence she came, shall be avenged by our own quill; and the clumsy Ichabod shall not be sent upon an unwilling pilgrimage without his own knowledge and consent, when he sees (sic) to sit quietly and cosily in his arm chair, under our head of ‘Original Tales’ ”.(1) “Sweet Helen’ undoubtedly was a reference to Sarah Power, and ‘Icabod’ was obviously Winslow Whitman himself, for this name had been assigned him by the Bachelors’ Club of Boston.(2) Until the day of her death Mrs. Whitman preserved in her scrapbook some of the sentimental scribblings of ‘Ichabod’.

The pages of the Spectator show a decidedly masculine touch, and the ladies who read it were frequently petted and flattered by the musings of bachelors who left the impression that the state of ‘single blessedness’ in reality carried with it all of the “ebb and flow of human misery”. Ichabod's bachelor lamentations might have served well as an inspiration for [page 71:] Donald Grant Mitchell, whose “Reveries of a Bachelor” brought to Mitchell showers of valentines and proposals of wedlock. But that was some thirty years later. The musings in the Spectator brought to that magazine no financial success, and there is no evidence that its editors were recipients thereby of any matrimonial temptations. Nevertheless, they suggest the tenor of Winslow Whitman's thoughts; he was seriously reflecting on his celibacy.

Toward the and of the year the annonymous [[anonymous]] editors of the Spectator were swept “like spiders from their corner”, and were told to “seek other corners in which to weave the web of fancy, and catch some little flattering of approbation for the mind's food”. One of the editors explained that the Spectator had been changed with a magic wand into a Bower of Taste, “even as in the days of Cinderella a pumpkin was spoke into a chariot”, and that he and his co-laborers were merely walking out the door and in due politeness offering a lady a chair. Fair lady knew best the taste of her sex, and “bachelors” had cares and dared not trust themselves with the gender feminine. Then with a touch of sour grapes, he assures his readers that instead of “an awkward companion who is often sticking his elbow into the side of hit refined neighbor, the editorial seat will now be occupied by one of pure elegant, and interesting [page 72:] colloquy, who will deserve that deference and praise which we could not have gained”. The name of the Spectator now became the Bower of Taste, and its new editor was a woman — Mrs. Katharine A. Ware.(1)

The shift of editors was one of some consequence to the women of Boston, for it presented an opportunity for woman to prove further her right to sex equality. Too frequently was she considered the inferior of man, and now through the efforts of Mrs. Ware she could show her superior talent in the field of belles-lettres. But this was to prove a change of more significance to Sarah Power, for it assisted in the precipitation of some rather humorous biokering between the sexes in staid old Boston, and helped to throw the spotlight upon Sarah, when, turning the tide in favor of her own sex, she made something of a triumphal entry into the life of the city.

There are reasons to believe that John Winslow Whitman, perhaps because of his health, had left the Spectator before masculine editors had with either real or affected humility yielded to the superiority of woman. He had found another corner in which “to weave the web of literary fancy”, but there was no spece in this corner for “sweet Helen”. He shifted to en entirely different side of the field and became a co-editor of the Bachelors’ Journal, a weekly magazine published by the Bachelors’ Club of Boston.(2) All of the petty nothings [page 73:] which had been uttered in the Spectator for the benefit of the ladies were now turned to the most venonous but good-humored railings against the weaker sex for the benefit of those males who had not yet “passed under the yoke”. This journal spoke of the “ding-dong dependencies” of matrimony, and of the propriety of adopting suitable modes of punishing all “giddy females”, but particularly those who “rode their husbands to church”, those who had the audacity to accept the honorable propositions of any man who had passed the sixth lustrum of his days, and again those who at any time were so foolish as to decline marriage when good offers were made to theme

But though railings and lamentations against Boston females filled the pages of the Bachelors’ Journal, a rather gay group must have been these associates of Winslow Whitman.

And John WInslow Whitnnn became an editor of this magazine.

But, as the writer later continued, the history of that journal was to be “registered in the annals of treason. Benedict was a saint compared to the editor of that paper”. He occasionally slipped a poem in the “Bower of Taste” [[Bower of Taste]], and he carried on a correspondence with “Cornelia”, a former contributor to the Spectator. In 1828 “Cornelia” had discarded her pseudonym and signed the name which later became famous in connection with Godey's Ladies Book; Sarah Josepha Hale had now taken the chair as editor of the Ladies' Magazine.(2) On May 21, 1828, she wrote to John Winslow concerning a contributor for her new magazine:

Winslow Whitman did know the “sweet Helen” and he no doubt soon after saw her, for one of his editorials in June tells of a ride to Providence from Boston in a chaise in the night.(2) And Winslow Whitman did possess “influence” over the young poet. The July issue of The [[the]] Ladies’ Magazine gives evidence that he used this influence in Mrs Hale's favor, for its pages were embellished with “The Blind Man's Lay”, lines which might easily have been mistaken for one of the mournful melodies of Mrs. Hemans, had they not been signed “Helen”.(3) On the other hand the month of July brought evidence of a different influence — the influence which “sweet Helen” possessed over the fierce young advocate of “celibean bliss”. This influence once applied, young Whitman wholly deserted the cause of his “fraternity”. His arch betrayal was wailed by the Bachelors’ Club through the pages of their Journal [[Journal]] for July 17.(4)

This as a signal victory for the ladies of Boston, and they squealed with delight. Two days later Mrs. Ware in The Bower of Taste gloated over female triumph:

A wedding at the Power home might have been slightly inconvenient and possibly embarrassing Sarah Helen Whitman, therefore, had been married at the home of Mrs. Bogert on Long Island. Nicholas Power not yet having returned from his voyages, Cornelius Bogert an probability gave the bride away. Cornelius Bogert had been fond of his niece. In his home, among friends who had contributed to the happiness of her early days — all except Anna Bartlett who was now dead — Sarah Helen Whitman spent the first part of her honeymoon. Then the [page 78:] young couple returned to Providence — not to the home on Benefit Street, — but to the home of Nicholas Power's old business partner, William Blodget. Here in the house on Smith's Blodget entertained them, and they remained in her home a week before their departure for Boston.(1)

And what was the custom of The Bachelor's Journal now that its popular young editor had played Judas and bowed to the”spell of Power”? One of the irate supports of celibacy stated to Hale that since its subscribers had no more souls than wives and no nore free will than its, The Bachelors’ Journal simply died.(2) But no! “Succesto Triumviri”, Mrs. Ware shouted in September from the pages of the Bower of Taste under the title of “Hymeneal Extra”.

Supporters of The Bachelors’ Journal did not seriously object to having their subscriptions turned over to the Yankee which was conducted by the very masculine Mr. John Neal, although he had expressed editorially his desire to see “she-editors as common as he-editors”. But when in 1830 this magazine union failed and their subscriptions were passed on to the Ladies’ Magazine, which was conducted by the very feminine Mrs. [page 79:] Hale, their indignation apparently knew no limits.

“It is too bad,” Mrs. Hale retorted in a long editorial, “to be convinced against your will, that ladies can do so much and so well.”(2)

But it was through “Helen” of Providence that the ladies of Boston had enjoyed this little triumph. The “spell of Power” had overcome that great “bulwark” of New England celibacy; and thus Sarah Whitman, on entering the hub of American intellectuality, was greeted with something of a literary fanfare.

——————————

Standing at the brink of a fortressed hill in the city of Boston in 1828 was the home of Mrs. Maria Brooks, a Boston poetess on Robert Southey once styled “Maria del Occident, the most impassioned and imaginative of all poetesses”. Maria wrote of love, both physical [page 80:] and spiritual, and she held the doctrine that Providence had provided somewhere a proper mate for each soul. Her personal adventures in soul matching had proven sad, for as a child, she had been unhappily wed to a wealthy Boston, merchant, and later had experienced a great love for a British army officer which had twice brought her to attempted suicide by means of laudanum. But love found its way into her verse, and in the house on Fort Hill she had composed many of her poetical effusions. Now she liked to sit dressed all in white with a passion flower in her hair and write poetry in a little Greek temple which a brother had built for her on his coffee plantation in far away Cuba.(1) John Winslow Whitman had known Mrs. Brooks, and when he returned to Boston with his poet-bride, he took her to live in that house on Fort Hill, now occupied by only Mrs. Brooks' sister.(2) Here from the wide and deep seated windows of the home of a sister poet, Sarah Whitman, could. view the whole harbor of Boston with its islands and the surrounding city.

The Boston which Sarah Whitman saw from her windows was a charming, comfortable old town of famous gardens, tree skirted streets, and solid brick stores and houses. The harbor was fringed with wharves and thus gave the picturesqueness of a successful seaport. In the distance shone the dome of the state house, gilded into self-respecting, sun reflecting splendor”. Then along [page 81:] Beacon Street and the hills were smooth-faced old mansions which gave a staid atmosphere of culture and untroubled self-respect.(1) There were humorous stories of pious ancestors who felt it necessary at times to hold on to the huckleberry bushes to escape translation, and the self respect of the present generation was sufficiently self-amatory to cause Emerson to boast humorously that the very aerial fluid around Boston was superior and more conducive to mod canners, and that the waters of the Charles were perhaps more clarifying to the brain than that of the Savannah or Alabama rivers. As a matter of fact Emerson suggested that the acridity of Potomac waters night be corrected by copious infusions of New England streams.(2) Although Emerson is humorous in his intent, thin egotistical atmosphere is what Sarah Whitman found when she went as a bride to Boston, an atmosphere which ordinarily would have been more stifling than clarifying to one from Providence, a city which, situated. as it is between Boston and New York, has always felt to some extent the superior shadows of these larger metropolises.

But Sarah Whitman had come to Boston as a woman who was without [[with]] neither pride nor culture. Again, her husband carried blood in his veins sufficiently blue to secure his bride a place in Boston society,(3) and the social life of the city was brilliant and gay. The [page 82:] life of the Whitmans in Boston, therefore, promised to be one of great happiness and success. Young Whitman's associates were carefree and attractive, and even the ‘bachelors’ could be depended upon to extent social graces to the ladies, if the ladies were sufficiently winsome. There were numerous forms of amusement which occupied the entire compass of the week. Fashionable ladies and gentlemen promenaded along Washington Street, and when in 1830 the cows were removed from the Common to make way for band concerts sponsored by the “society for the Prevention of Temperance”, immense crowds thronged there to hear the music. These were the days of the celebrated beauty, Emily Marshall, to was the center of attraction, and the rise of the acrostic mania gave young dandies like N. P. Willis excuse to sing her praises.(1)

These Boston days form a period of great import; in the life of Sarah Whitman, for there was beginning to rise in the city that restless feeling which was later to manifest itself in movements that were to interest Mrs. Whitman, and in some of which she was to assume an active part. During her life there William Lloyd Garrison delivered his first lecture to vindicate the “rights of two million American citizens now groaning in servile chains”. Two years later the ladies of Boston formed the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, and many prominent men and women joined the crusade.(2) Then came the [page 83:] great movement for temperance, and the pages of the ladies’ magazine urged the women to assist in crushing the fiery evil of alchohol [[alcohol]]. In 1828 John Neal, whom Mrs.Whitman knew and greatly admired, urged the ladies to join the fight, pressing them with the charge of responsibility for mob of the alchoholic [[alcoholic]] evil.(1) But perhaps most impressive to Sarah Whitman at this time was the fight which Boston women were making for neater liberty and sex-equality. The. medieval ages had lasted longer for wcxneri then for men; the law. deelared women inferior to men, and no institution of higher learning or professional training was open to them. From the pages of the Ladies’ Magazine, Mrs. Hale begged for more opportunities for female education.. No woman, she argued, wished to ocoupy a place in the lecture room of the physician, in the forum, nor in the halls of legislation; but, on the other hand, woman was not formed to be a trifler on earth, and she had mental powers which if not equal to her lord's, were yet too precious to be wasted. The minds of women had suffered from a reputed inferiority that had brought about a pity akin to contempt in the opposite sex; yet women were not permitted even to attempt an escape without encountering a greater evil. This was the fear or ridicule, the hatred or envy, which learned women, as they were contemptuously styled, had usually to encounter.(2) [page 84:]

Boston was awhirl with new ideas; and since it was a small city, impressions spread fast. Unitarianism had begun early to free minds from theological traces. Some said that the movement had come with the China trade; others suggested a more diabolical origin.(1) The doctrines of the Unitarians were not novel to Sarah Whitman, for some years earlier the good Baptists of Providence had been sufficiently stirred by President Messer's leanings in this direction to ask his resignation from Boston University.(2) But ideas were now being openly discussed. Years before, the eloquent Buckminster “celebrating the marriage of Unitarianism with literature” had stirred Bostonians to gather in parlors for free discussions, and now liberal ministers, lawyers, and physicians formed clubs, and talked of Byron and Wordsworth; and the ladies held fashionable morning drawing classes in their homes.(3) In 1829 Mrs. Hale announced the establishment of “Ladies’ Literary Rooms” where the best English and French magazines could be found.(4) It is said that a new thought was as exciting as news of a European war would have been, and ideas spread through the Boston streets like en epidemic. Citizens were seized in turn by phrenology, vegetarianism, transcendentalism, mesmerism, and later Spiritualism.

Sarah Whitman could not have escaped these forces. She had come to Boston from a city where her circle was narrow, yet she had come as a young woman of [page 85:] intellect with an eager, curious mind. She listened to the eloquent discourses of Channing and Beecher and Emerson; and she absorbed ideas which were to influence considerably her later life. All of Boston was being electrified by Channing, who, with a passionate faith in man's intellectual being, in the power and dignity of the mind, was rejecting old faiths and seeking through his preaching to form a new race of men. “Conformity,” he shouted, “benumbs and cramps genius and power,” and he wondered at the faculties slumbering within Boston, weighed down as it was by the chains of custom, bound by a dead religion, by ignorance and apathy and provincial self-satisfaction.(1) Channing's thoughts might be traced through Sarah Whitman's mental activities for many years to come. She became untiring in her efforts to sever bonds at intellectual convention, and to establish a liberty of thought and conscience. In addition to these new opportunities for mental stimulus, she now found herself enjoying the advantages of a close contact with the Boston literati, and she joined that group of poets who found it both daring and pleasant to publish in the ladies’ magazines.

Mrs. Whitman had now changed her position to one of some responsibility, yet she had not made the shift without serious feeling, without some sense of foreboding sadness. When in September her husband was [page 86:] preparing the house on Fort Hill for their residence, Sarah returned to her home in Providence.(1) While in her native city she felt some pangs of homesickness for those scenes which she had known in her childhood, and which she had exchanged for her residence in Boston. Summer had fled, and autumn brought with it themes for contemplation. She was now a mature woman, and she summed up the change in a sketch called “Autumnal Thoughts” published in the Bower of Taste the following month.

One wonders if Sarah Whitman held the letters of Anna Bartlett before her as she wrote these lines, [[:]]

The season of flowers had passed, and nature had put on the sober tobes of autumn. Sarah Whitman returned to the home on Fort Hill — a mature woman.

There was entertainment to be had in the house on Fort Hill, for when Mrs. Brooks departed for her Greek temple in Cuba she left behind a library in which Sarah Whitman read. Here she no doubt became acquainted with much of the sentimental verse which Maria Brooks had written, and with those poets and authors who had inspired Mrs. Brooks to write. Here also she found works of the bold, impulsive John Neal, and she read his “Niagara” which a critic had pronounced “one wild, weltering smash of magnificence”. She greatly admired John Neal; and years later, as she stood on a balcony overlooking Niagara Falls, as the light of a burning mill gleamed fitfully over the wild [page 88:] white waters of the river, and made their foaming crests look like the tossing nines of war horses hurrying to fields of death and carnage”, from the obscurest depths of her memory she recalled and quoted to a friend who stood beside her two lines from Mr. Neal's poem.(1)

John Neal was a man to be admired and a man to be respected. He was a great literary force in Boston in the years immediately following 1828, for as Mrs. Katherine Ware remarked in the autumn of the year; “this watchful Cerberus of American literature — this insatiate gourmand of letters — has swallowed the Literary Gazette for breakfast, pounced upon The Bachelors’ Journal for lunch, and we have no doubt intends to dine upon half the journals of our city. Heaven defend us! Perhaps we, and twenty more like us, if they may be found, are destined to be served up for his petit souper”.(2) No! John Neal seems never to have cared to make a meal of the Bower of Taste, but it was not long before he consumed Mrs. Hale's Ladies’ Magazine; and through his versatility of talent and independence of spirit, he became celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. He was a fearless and voluminous writer, and when a British critic asked with a sneer, “Who reads an American book?”, Neal commenced another novel, and taking it to England, saw to it that it appeared in Blackwood's is [[in]] less than a year. He had confronted the aristocrats [page 89:] of the “Monthlies” and “Quarterlies” and had compelled them to make room for their country cousins.(1)

In the autumn of 1828 John Neal was yet a bachelor and spent a part of his time in Boston. He had been associated with John Winslow Whitman in the literary world, and he was among those guests who were entertained by the Whitmans on Fort Hill. Of her first interview with John Neal Mrs. Whitman later remarked:

Neal might have told this admiring group how only one month before he had offered. encouragement to an obscure poet, John Greenleaf Whittier, and thus prevented him from abandoning the purstit of “poetry and everything else of a literary nature”; he might have told of words of gratitude he had recently received from N. P. Willis, a struggling Boston poet whom he had encouraged;(2) and then one would like to believe that the brilliant conversation of John Neal on this delightful evening in the home of Sarah Whitman in Boston included the story of an obscure twenty year old Baltimore poet who had just written for the editor of the Yankee some rather exquisite “nonsensical” lines about “Heaven”, which Neal thought right be made into [page 91:] a beautiful and perhaps magnificent poem, if the author would but do himself justice”. These feelings which Neal expressed in the columns of his magazine were the very first words of encouragement” which Edgar Poe “ever remembered to have received”, and in gratitude to the editor of the Yankee and Literary Gazette he dedicated the second edition of “Tamerlane”.(1)

The literary friends of her husband formed Sarah Whitman's chief associates during her life in Boston, She had been drawn to John Winslow Whitman to a great extent because of’ his literary ability and aspirations, and his friends among the Boston literati were a source of additional pleasure. She enjoyed the gatherings of his masculine acquaintances, but she also became closely associated with some of the ladies of the city who were at this time attempting to raise the name of “authoress” above the sneers of the contemptuous. In an age which only recently had conjured up the most evil imaginations and had grown pale at the very mention of the word novel, it is not surprising to find that when a woman was spoken of as an authoress, much more was meant than met the ear.(2) But Sarah Whitman joined that group of ladies who dared to write, and she became closely associated with their fearless advocate and leader, Sarah Josepha Hale. She had responded to Mrs. Hale's request for a contribution in July with “The Blind Man's [page 92:] Lay”,(1) and again, in October she allowed Mrs. Hale to publish “To the Spirit of Poetry”.(2) Heretofore the association had been a purely literary one, but on December 11, 1828, Mrs. Hale wrote to Sarah Whitman of her great desire to meet her since her last beautiful contribution to the Ladies’ Magazine. Fortune had not yet favored her with this pleasure, but she wished to express less formally than by letter the great obligation which Sarah Whitman conferred upon her in tendering her genius to her editorial care. She said that no other work had pleased her more than Mrs. Whitman's, and that her own judgment in this respect had been confirmed by the public approbation, Then Mrs. Hale asked that Mrs. Whitman become a stated contributor for the ensuing year, saying that the reward she would be able to offer could not be adequate to the merits of her pieces, but that she trusted that Mrs. Whitman's heart would allowance in her favor. But, she continued, if Mrs. Whitman did not feel that she could engage for so long a times she would like for her to contribute something for the January number, as she was sure that what Mrs. Whitman offered would add to the value of the work.(3) Mrs. Whitman did not engage as a contributor for the entire year, but she did send for the January issue of the Ladies' Magazine, “Retrospection”, a poem of childhood memories and lost hopes, which might be looked upon with [page 93:] some interest as an autobiographical item.(1) This was the beginning of a long literary friendship with the future of Lady of Godey's, and it was also the beginning of a personal friendship, for Mrs. Hale now sent her compliments to John Winslow Whitman, whom she had known as the “Bachelor” editor, and asked that he come with his wife to call at her lodging in No. 56 Eliot Street.(2)

During the Christmas season of 1828 the Whitmans moved from the Brooks’ home on Fort Hill. Sarah had returned for a visit in Providence while her husband superintended the moving of the household goods to a place on Purchase Street. John Winslow Whitman was not so careful in the moving, and his wife afterward told with much glee and some superstition how a mirror had fallen from the furniture wagon and rolled without breaking all the way to the bottom of the long hill. But the young couple remained on Purchase Street only until May, at which time they moved to the home of a Mrs. Burdges which was located just across the street from the Tremont theater.(3)

Boston supported two theaters at this time. The Tremont had just undergone lavish improvements, and now presented an interior of “classic beauty” and “rainbow brilliancy” — and there was a “luxurious” retreat, the Saloon. From its stage were to be heard Booth, Kean, Forrest, and sometimes Mrs. Kemble. The Boston theater, [page 94:] not to be outdone, had engaged a French company, whose general effect upon the audience, much to the disgust of the literati, was about the same as would have been that of a well organized puppet show — for they laughed where they should have cried, and some yawned “in the most expressive style at some of Monsieur's finest sentiments!” . The city was not yet ready for the histrionic talent of the French stage.(1)

But the best talent of this country could be seen on the Tremont stage; and, living in such close proximity and feeling none of the popular antipathy toward the actor's profession, Sarah Whitman soon counted among her personal friends some of the outstanding actors of her day. She made the acquaintance of Mrs. Barrett, who had been “rapturously acknowledged throughout the United States” as a melodramatic actress in such plays as “She Stoops to Conquer” and “Cicily Homespun”. And again she came to know personally the actor Wilson who had won much acclaim in the character of Iago.(2) She held the stage in great respect, for there she saw the creatures of her dreams, and luxuriated in the representation of past romance. She was later to take an active part in the opening of a theater in her native city.

The Whitmans did not remain long at the home of Mrs, Burdges, but by the middle of the year moved [page 95:] again, this time to rooms occupied formerly by the orator, Edward Everett. During the month of July they returned to Providence, and while he was there, John Winslow Whitman walked with Anna Power to the Grotto, down by the Moses Brown Bridge. It was always Mrs. Whitman's belief that during this walk her husband caught the cold which eventually resulted in his permanent illness. Soon after, Winslow Whitman became very ill with bilious colic, a disease at that time very little known and quite dangerous.. He made an attempt to return to Boston, but was forced to stop at the Boylston Hotel where he suffered two relapses of the sickness before he could be removed to his father's home at Pembroke. Young Whitman's health had always been uncertain, but he was now unquestionably suffering from that frequent and popular disease of his generation — consumption. As soon as his health improved, he returned to Boston, and his wife soon followed, only to learn from Mrs. Hale that she would find her husband confined within the limits of Leverett Street prison. John Winslow Whitman apparently having signed his name to a worthless note, had been arrested for his inability to make good his endorsement. During the winter the Whitmans occupied the Everett rooms, and Mrs. Whitman was forced at times, because of the severe cold, to sit wrapped in. a coat. It was thus that she spent much of the winter, reading the books that had been left by Edward [page 96:] Everett,(1) and possibly thinking often of that Boston “Abelard” who had visited Greece as a friend of Byron, and whose speeches on liberty and freedom attracted students even from remote villages of Tennessee and Kentucky.

The cares of the world were beginning to fall heavily upon the shoulders of Sarah Whitman, and she was experiencing some of those difficulties which her own mother had known in previous years. She had married an impractical man, and there was sometimes anxiety concerning household expenses. As Mrs. Whitman once remarked, her husband had much talent as a lawyer, poet, wit, and orator,. but he was a man with a fatal exuberance of talent who was apt to neglect the slow methods of routine and seek out royal reads to success.(2) It is more than likely, therefore, that that love which to her had seemed “too fair for earth” was beginning to undergo some change. Love to her had been “a golden dream”, a flight of her poetic imagination; and when its realities had threatened, she had buried herself in poetry and romance. But now, having been forced to view the subject from a different aspect, she seems to have become somewhat bitter, and we find her expressing sentiments in her poetry which might have been less startling had they from the lips of he mother. For instance: [page 97:]

It is quite possible that those earthy aspects of love which were bound to cone with marriage had from the first proved distasteful to Sarah Whitman. She was a woman of delicate constitution who had experienced severe illnesses. High strung wad nervous, she had lived her early life altogether in the company of women, and she felt a great affection for members of her own sex. We know that by the time she entertained proposals of marriage from other men, after the death of her husband, she was certain that she could not support the physical aspects of marriage; and there are reasons for believing that her certainty grew out of the unhappiness of her earlier experience. We find from her writings that love to her now was something which brought with it a penalty and consumed, leaving one to endure all the “waking woes of life”.(2) She had reached the “high noon of her life, yet with it had come sorrow, despairs and a sense of loneliness and void. She felt that life held no purpose, and she was haunted by the sense of a lost ideal. Many of those whom [page 98:] she had loved were now dead, and over her husband there hovered the shadow of disease.(1)

The beginning of 1830 brought some hope of financial relief. John Winslow Whitman went to Maine where he argued a case which gave him some fame as well as money. Then on his return to Boston by stage he again thought he had found the “royal road to success”, for he became acquainted with an inventor who proposed a cheaper method of production which would reduce the price of steel. Whitman became actively interested, and he and Sarah now dreamed of a quick fortune.(2)

In the early thirties the Whitmans kept a home at 99 Chambers Street, and John Winslow Whitman pursued his profession at 12 Court Square.(3) There were frequent visits back to Providence, and often the young couple returned to the Winslow mansion “Careswell” at Marshfield where John Winslow Whitman had spent a great part of his boyhood as the favorite grandson of Dr. Isaac Winslow. Sarah Whitman delighted in the tradition of her husband's family, and she was particularly proud of Josiah Winslow, an ancestor who had “won for himself the proud distinction of being the most accomplished gentleman and the most delightful companion in all New England.” She admired the antique furniture at “Careswell” — the heavy oak chairs and old tables which she was told had been brought from England. She loved the stern old portraits [page 99:] which covered the walls, and she reveled in “Careswell”, the only estate in New England which had remained by uninterrupted transmission in the families of the Puritans.(1)

Pride of ancestry had always been a dominant characteristic of Sarah Whitman, but her reverence for the Winslow tradition, and her comfort in the respectability of her husband's family must have been increased with the constant reminder of these difficulties which continued in her own family. Apparently she had told her friends in Boston that, her father had died when she was a mere child, for this was the impression which Mrs. Hale had as late as 1837.(2) But Nicholas Power was not dead, and Mrs. Power no longer signified her widowhood in the Providence directory. Certainly by the beginning of the thirties the Powers were not only aware of the existence of Nicholas, but knew something of his whereabouts, for in 1831 William Staples addressed a letter to him in care of Francis Bailey, Esq., St. Bartholemew.(3) The problems involved in settling the Power estate were becoming more numerous and more confusing; and although Mrs. Power was not lacking in legal assistance, two of her daughters having married lawyers, there was little that could be done in the absence of her husband. Consequently William Staples’ letter had been directed toward encouraging his father-in-law's [page 100:] return and reconcilement with his family.

There are only two fragments of William Staples’ letter extant. In the first we find that Nicholas Power had learned of significant changes in his family since his departure — Rebecca and Sarah had married, and since 1824 Rebecca and two of her children had been dead.(1) We also find that Nicholas held some fear that William Staples would withdraw his protection from the Power family, new that his wife was dead.

A second fragment from this same letter reveals to what extent the Power estate had fallen by 1831, and suggests reason for Nicholas Power's determination not to return to his native city during the past years. [page 101:]

This urgent plea for the return of the roving Nicholas went unheeded for some time yet, and Mrs. Power was left to suffer these fears that were “sinking her to the grave”. So Sarah Power did possibly find some solace in her husband's family in both Boston and Pembroke. But her Boston days were numbered and she was soon to return to Providence to remain; for her husband could not live. The end came in the summer of 1835. Young Whitman had gone for a visit to his father in Pembroke, and Sarah had gone to Providence. She [page 103:] was therefore not with her husband when on July 25 he breathed his last. In fact it was five days before she learned the melancholy news.. On July 30 William Patten, calling at the house on Benefit Street, announced to Sarah Whitman that John Winslow Whitman was dead.(1)

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So in 1833 Mrs. Whitman returned to Providence to live with her mother and sister on Benefit Street. The household now included also Mrs. Bogert, who on the death of her husband the previous year, had come to live with her sister.(3) And here they were all living when in September Nicholas Power came sailing back into the harbor which he had left some nineteen years before. But there is no evidence that Nicholas was “welcomed into the bosom of his family” or that his return lighted a “smile around the family hearth” as William Staples had so hopefully predicted. As a matter of fact the only reaction of his family recorded is that penned by Anna in her humorous couplet, the ladies were simply “frightened out of their wits”, Mrs. Power was without doubt bitter, and one would therefore [page 104:] suspect that her husband received no “bed and board” at 50 Benefit Street. At any rate, when the cold winds of December came. Nicholas over boarded a sloop for Charleston where both weather and welcome were warmer. Here he stopped with the Williamses and enjoyed “fine times” — such fine times that it was two more years before he returned to the old northern port on Narragansett.(1)

The home of her mother could have been of no great comfort to the young widow in her bereavement. The shadow cast by her father's conduct was now deepened by his unexpected return; and a growing shadow of even darker taint was ever before her in the presence of her sister Anna, whose eccentricities increased with her years; Mrs. Bogert continually nagged at her to marry a Mr. Kneeland, a widower attracted by her still youthful charms; and at the time Mrs. Power, in her bitterness, objected “as she always did” to any further alliance or complications with the male sex.(2) Sarah had been very much attached to her sister Rebecca who had died in 1825; and Anna Bartlett who had been as a mother to her had died in 1826. She had known a love which had become “bankrupt and blighted” by its “own fond excess of happiness”. Her marriage to Winslow Whitman had brought some happiness, but those days in Boston had brought disappointed hopes and a sense of [page 105:] despair, a “dreadless doom” which one might find it difficult to understand or explain. Her entire married life had been a period of great anxiety; and sad as the occasion might have been, she was for reasons of her own relieved at the death of her husband.(1) These were without doubt her darkest days; she had been torn from the realms of romance and steeped in reality, and she had not yet developed a philosophy which would provide an outlet of escape. She found some solace in reading with Mrs. John Larned, and in wandering with Anna through the woods and along the hillsides about Providence.(2) The season of autumn brought sad memories, and like her sister poets she had learned to find some pleasure in melancholy reveries of decay and death. Some lines in true Della-Cruscan fashion which she wrote in November picture somewhat the mental struggle which she was experiencing at this time:

Confronted with the perplexing problem of eternity, the enigma of death and decay, Sarah Whitman had simply submitted to destiny and had found something of serenity in those doctrines of necessity and resignation which were to form the keynote of her religious philosophy for the remainder of her existence. On the other hand, she was not to arrive at a complete resignation without a struggle; and the succeeding years found her seeking for the truth, investigating all new doctrines and theories with the zeal of the New England transcendentalist, accepting those which appealed to her own inner conscience, and rejecting those which he felt were false, but fighting always for man's right to come to his own decision in matters pertaining to the enigma of God and the universe.