"There was a singular attraction in the personal presence of this woman. The rooms where she lived habitually were full of her. They were dim, shadowy rooms, rich in tone, crowded with objects of interest, packed with the memorials of a lifetime of friendships; but she herself was always more interesting than her surroundings. When she died, her soft brown hair was scarcely touched with gray. Her voice retained to the last its music, vibrating at seventy-five with the sympathetic cadences of her youth. She was singularly shy. I remember that when I persuaded her to repeat to me one of her poems, she always insisted on going behind me. She could not bring herself to confront eye and ear at the same time." The letters of Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton have been published in the biography of the former, but the following is so unusual--"the lady's gentle vexation at having been made out younger than she was," commented the recipient of the letter; "is so exceptional among women as to be amusing"--that it may be quoted. _Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton_ "I will speak of one or two points suggested by the expression, 'true to her early love for Edgar Poe.' Now I was first _seen_ by Edgar Poe in the summer of 1845, when I was forty-two years old, and my earliest introduction to him was in 1848, when I was forty-five. You will see, therefore, that it was rather a _late_ than an _early_ love. I was born on the 19th of January, 1803--Edgar Poe was born on the 19th of January, 1809, being six years, to a day, my junior. Soon after the last edition of Griswold's 'Female Poets' was issued, I happened to be turning over some of the new Christmas books at a bookseller's, when I unwittingly opened a copy of that work, at the very page where an alert, enterprising woman sits perched on a marble pedestal. Glancing at the foot of the page, I read, in blank amazement, my own name. Turning to the preceding page, I found that the lady in question was born in 1813! I began seriously to doubt my own identity. I had never, to the best of my recollection, been modelled in plaster; I had never been 'interviewed' on the delicate point of age. Everybody knows that a lady's age after forty is proverbially uncertain; still it is as well to draw a line somewhere, and so, dear, if you should be called upon to write my obituary, and should consent to do so, here is a faithful transcript from the family Bible:-- "'Sarah Helen Power, born Jan. 19--10 o'clock P.M., 1803.' "That was the same year that gave birth to Emerson." Mr. Longfellow wrote to thank Mrs. Moulton for her paper on Mrs. Whitman, and at no great interval he wrote again in acknowledgment of an article upon his own poetry also in the _Athenæum_. _Mr. Longfellow to Mrs. Moulton_ CAMBRIDGE, May 17, 1879.