One of the most touching incidents in Poe's early life was his affection and fidelity to Mrs. Helen Stannard, who had completely won the sensitive boy's heart by her kindness to him when he came to her house with her son, a favorite school-friend. This lady died under circumstances of peculiar sorrow, and her young admirer was in the habit of visiting her grave every night. It was she--"the one idolatrous and purely ideal love" of his passionate boyhood--who inspired those exquisite lines, "Helen, thy beauty is to me." Mr. Richard Henry Stoddard, in his article on Poe published in _Harper's Monthly_ for May, 1872, says, in allusion to Mrs. Stannard: "The memory of this lady _is said_ to have suggested the most beautiful of his minor poems, 'Helen,' though I am not aware _that Poe ever countenanced the idea_." As Mrs. Whitman had distinctly stated in _Edgar Poe and his Critics_ that Mrs. Stannard _had_ inspired the poem, she addressed a note to Mr. Stoddard upon the subject, to which he sent the following reply: "MY DEAR MRS. WHITMAN: So many months have elapsed since I wrote the paper on Poe about which you write that I am unable to remember what I said in it. I certainly had no intention to discredit any statement that you made in _Edgar Poe and his Critics_, and if I have done so I am sorry for it, and ask your forgiveness." In one of Mrs. Whitman's letters, now lying before me, she says: "So much has been written, and so much still continues to be written, about Poe by persons who are either his avowed or secret enemies, that I joyfully welcome every friendly or impartial word spoken in his behalf. His enemies are uttering their venomous fabrications in every newspaper, and so few voices can obtain a hearing in his defence. My own personal knowledge of Mr. Poe was very brief, although it comprehended memorable incidents, and was doubtless, as he kindly characterized it in one of his letters of the period, 'the most earnest epoch of his life;' and such I devoutly and emphatically believe it to have been. You ask me to furnish you with extracts from his letters, literary or otherwise. There are imperative reasons why these letters cannot and _ought_ not to be published at present--not that there was a word or a thought in them discreditable to Poe, though some of them were imprudent, doubtless, and liable to be construed wrongly by his enemies. They are for the most part strictly _personal_. The only extract from them of which I have authorized the publication is a fac-simile of a paragraph inserted between the 68th and 69th pages of Mr. Ingram's memoir in Black's (Edinburgh) edition of the complete works of Poe. The paragraph in the original letter (dated November 24, 1848) consists of only eight lines: 'The agony which I have so lately endured--an agony known only to my God and to myself--seems to have passed my soul through fire, and purified it from all that is weak. Henceforward I am strong: this those who love me shall see, as well as