There were objections, she told him—­she was older than he.

“Has the soul age, Helen?” he answered her.  “Can immortality regard time?  Can that which began never and shall never end consider a few wretched years of its incarnate life?  Do you not perceive that it is my diviner nature—­my spiritual being, that burns and pants to commingle with your own?”

She urged her frail health as an objection.

For that he would love—­worship her—­the more, he said.  He plead for her pity upon his loneliness—­his sorrows—­and swore that he would comfort and soothe her in hers, through life, and when death should come, joyfully go down with her into the night of the grave.

Finally he appealed to her ambition.

“Was I right, Helen, in my first impression of you?—­in the impression that you are ambitious?  If so, and if you will have faith in me, I can and will satisfy your wildest desires.  Would it not be glorious to establish in America, the sole unquestionable aristocracy—­that of the intellect—­to secure its supremacy—­to lead and control it?”

Still the yes that so often seemed trembling upon her lips was not spoken.  She received his almost daily letters and his frequent visits, listened to his rapturous love-making—­trembling, blushing, letting him see that she was under the spell, that she loved him.  Indeed she could not have helped his seeing it had she wished; but when he spoke of marriage she hesitated—­tantalizing him to the point of madness, almost.

What was it that held her back?—­She too, believed that it was the hand of Fate that had brought them together—­that they were pre-ordained to cheer each other’s latter years, to establish that intellectual aristocracy of which he dreamed.  Yet she shrank from taking the step.  When his great solemn eyes were upon her, his beautiful face pale and haggard with excess of feeling, turned toward her, his eloquent words of love in her ears, she sat as one entranced—­bewitched; yet she would not give the word he longed for—­the word of willingness to embark with him upon the sea of life. Fear checked her.  Such an uncharted sea it seemed to her—­she dared not say him yea!

The truth was the poison was working—­the Griswold poison.  The wildest rumors came to her ears of the worse than follies of her lover.  She knew that they were at least, overdrawn—­possibly altogether false—­yet they frightened her.

“Do you know Helen Whitman?” wrote one of The Dreamer’s enemies to Dr. Griswold.  “Of course you have heard it rumored that she is to marry Poe.  Well, she has seemed to me a good girl and—­you know what Poe is.  Has Mrs. Whitman no friend in your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?”

But Rufus Griswold had already “explained Poe” to those whom he knew would take pains to pass the explanation on to “Helen”—­had dropped the poison where he reckoned it would work with the greatest speed and effect.  The explanation, with the usual indirectness of a Griswold, was sugared with a compliment.