Carried away by the ardor and eloquent passion of her poet-lover, and full of the sweetest human sympathy and the tenderest human charity for one so gifted but so unfortunate, Mrs. Whitman, against the advice of her relatives and friends, consented to a conditional engagement. It was in relation to this engagement, and the cause of its being broken off, that one of the most calumnious stories against Poe was told, and believed both in America and in Europe, but especially in England. Why the engagement was broken, and by whom, still remains buried in mystery, but that Poe was guilty of any "outrage" at her house upon the eve of their intended marriage was emphatically denied by Mrs. Whitman. She pronounced the whole story a "calumny." In a letter before me she says: "I do not think it possible to overstate the gentlemanly reticence and amenity of his habitual manner. It was stamped through and through with the impress of nobility and gentleness. I have seen him in many moods and phases in those 'lonesome, latter years' which were rapidly merging into the mournful tragedy of death. I have seen him sullen and moody under a sense of insult and imaginary wrong. I have _never_ seen in him the faintest indication of savagery and rowdyism and brutality." Some of the most tenderly passionate of Mrs. Whitman's verses were inspired by her affection for Poe. She wrote six sonnets to his memory, overflowing with the most exalted love and generous sympathy. The first of these sonnets ends thus: _Thou_ wert my destiny: thy song, thy fame, The wild enchantments clustering round thy name, Were my soul's heritage--its regal dower, Its glory, and its kingdom, and its power. When malice had exhausted itself in heaping obloquy upon the name of the dead poet, it was the gentle hand of woman that first removed the odium from his memory. It was Mrs. Whitman--who loved him and whom he loved--that dared to penetrate the "mournful corridors" of that sad, desolate heart, with its "halls of tragedy and chambers of retribution," and tell the true but melancholy story of the unhappy master of the Raven. It was she who generously came forward as "one of the friends" of him who was said to have no friends. She was his steady champion from first to last. Whether it was some crackbrain scribbler who tried to prove Poe "mad," some accomplished scholar who endeavored to disparage him in order to magnify some other writer, or some silly woman who attempted to foist herself into notice by relating "imaginary facts" concerning the poet's hidden life, Mrs. Whitman was always ready to defend her dead friend.