The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1721]
So the lady of the garden was Helen Whitman! whose poetry had impressed him favorably and whose acquaintance he had desired. Helen Whitman—Helen! As he repeated the name his heart stood still,—even in her name he heard the voice of Fate. Helen—the name of the good angel of his boyhood! Were his dreams of "Morella" and of "Ligeia" to come true? Was he to know in reality the miracle he had imagined and written of in these two phantasies?—the reincarnation of personal identity? Was he in this second Helen, in this second garden, to find again the worshipped Helen of his boyhood?
He turned to the lines he had written so long ago, in Richmond, when he had gone forth into the midsummer moonlight, even as he had gone forth in Providence, and had worshipped under a window, even as he had worshipped at a garden gate. He read the first two stanzas through.
As he read he gave himself up to an overwhelming sense of fatality. Could anything be more fitting—more descriptive? The end of the days of miracles was not yet—this was his "Helen of a thousand dreams!"
His impulse was to seek an introduction at once, but this seemed too tamely conventional. Besides—he was in the hands of Fate—he dared not stir. Fate, having so clearly manifested itself, would find a way.
His correspondence was always heavy. Letters, clippings from papers and so forth, came to him by every post from friends and from enemies, with and without signatures. Yet from all the mass, he knew at once that the "Valentine," unsigned as it was, was from her.
By way of acknowledgment, he turned down a page of a copy of "The Raven and Other Poems" at the lines, "To Helen," and mailed it to her. He waited in anxious suspense for a reply, but the lady was coy. Days passed and still no answer. The desire for communication with her became irresistible and taking pen and paper he wrote at the top of the page, even as long ago he had written, the words, "To Helen," and underneath wrote a new poem especially for this new Helen in which he described the vision of her in the garden (but placing it in the far past) and his feelings as he gazed upon her:
"I saw thee once—once only—years ago; I must not say how many—but not many.
Clad all in white, upon a violet bank I saw thee half reclining; while the moon Fell on the upturned faces of the roses, And on thine own, upturned,—alas in sorrow! Was it not Fate, that, on this July midnight— Was it not Fate (whose name is also Sorrow) That bade me pause before that garden-gate To breathe the incense of those slumbering roses? No footstep 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!" ...
The paper trembled in the hands—tiny and spirit-like—of Helen Whitman. Her soul answered emphatically,
"It is Fate!"
So he had been there in the flesh—near her—in the shadows of that mystic night! The presence was no creation of an overwrought imagination. It was Fate.
Tremulously she penned her answer to his appeal, but was it Fate again, which caused the letter to miscarry? It reached him finally, in Richmond—Richmond, of all places!—whither he had gone to deliver to audiences of his old friends, his lecture upon "The Poetic Principle," in the interest of the establishment of his magazine, The Stylus. What could have been more fitting than that the gracious words of "Helen of a thousand dreams" should come to him in Richmond?
Not many days later and he was under her own roof in Providence.
He waited in the dimness of her curtained drawing-room, ear strained for the first sound of her footstep. Noiselessly as a sunbeam or a shadow she entered the room, her gauzy white draperies floating about her slight figure as she came, while his great eyes drank in with reverent joy each detail of her ethereal loveliness—her face, the same he had seen in the garden, pale as a pearl and as softly radiant, and framed in clustering dark ringlets which escaped in profusion from the confinement of a lacy widow's cap—the tremulous mouth—the eyes, mysterious