"She was considered very eccentric--impulsive and regardless of conventionalities. She dressed always in white, and on the coldest winter evenings, with snow on the ground, would cross over to our house in thin slippers and with nothing on her head but a thin, gauzy, white scarf. She probably thought this æsthetic--and perhaps it was. There was one thing which I must not omit to mention, because it was a part of herself--_ether_. The scent accompanied her everywhere. It was said she could not write except under its influence, but of this I do not know." As an illustration of her impulsive ways, Mrs. Kellogg says: "I was one evening, when a little girl, sitting on the front steps when she and her sister, Miss Powers, crossed over to our house. They went into the parlor, and I heard Mrs. Whitman ask my sister to sing for her _The Mocking Bird_. She appreciated my sister's beautiful singing, but on this occasion, while she was in the very midst of '_Listen to the Mocking Bird_,' suddenly a cloud of white rushed past me like a tornado, and I heard Mrs. Whitman's voice exclaiming excitedly, '_I have it! I have it!_' Of course, we were all astonished and could not understand it at all, until Miss Powers afterward explained it to us. It seems that the beautiful music and singing had excited in her some poetic thought or idea; and, regardless or forgetful of conventionalities, she had impulsively rushed home to put it in writing, or perhaps in poetry, before it should vanish away." Miss Sarah Jacobs, one of Griswold's "_Female Poets_," and a friend of Mrs. Whitman, describes her as small and dark, with deep-set dreamy eyes "that looked above and beyond but never _at_ you;" quick, bird-like motions, and as being a believer in occult influences, as Poe himself professed to be. "For all the sweet, poetic fragrance of her nature, she took an interest in common things. She was wise, she was witty; and no one could be long in her presence without becoming aware of the sweet and generous sympathy of her nature." Up to this time Poe and Mrs. Whitman had never met, though Mrs. Osgood says that the lady had written to him and sent him a valentine, of which he had taken no notice. This was against him in his present venture, but he was not discouraged. He set about his courtship in his usual manner, by addressing to Mrs. Whitman (June 10) some lines--"_To Helen_"--commencing: "I saw thee once--once only;--" supposed to commemorate his first sight of her as, passing her garden "one July midnight," he beheld her robed in white, reclining on a bank of violets, with her eyes raised heavenward. "No footsteps stirred; the hated world all slept, Save only thee and me. Oh, heaven--oh, God! How my heart beats in coupling those two words-- Save only _thee and me_!"