I have seen your friend —— since I came here. Somebody called on us the very evening after we arrived, and on going downstairs who should it be but our interesting friend. He attacked me upon the subject of a vegetable diet, and I replied by fun, which rather disconcerted him. He has not been here since.
I have felt a little of the swell of fashionable society since I have been here. Dr. Elwyn, a kinsman of mine, hearing that I was in town, called upon me and has been very attentive ever since. He is an agreeable man and somewhat literary for Philadelphia. His mother, who has lately quitted Episcopacy for Presbyterianism, called on us to-day, and told me that her “pastor,” the Rev. Dr. Bethune, was coming to see me. Authorship might have taken the place of misery in Shakespeare’s aphorism.
The abolitionists here are very pleasant and kind.... Maria sends her best love. I mean Mrs. Lowell sends it. Give my kind remembrances to Austin and to Owen. The package of the latter came safe.
God bless you! Most lovingly yours,
J. R. L.
Mrs. Lowell sings her second in this duet in a letter to Mrs. Hawthorne, written two days later, in which she says: “We are most delightfully situated here in every respect, surrounded with kind and sympathizing friends, yet allowed by them to be as quiet and retired as we choose; but it is always a pleasure to know you can have society if you wish for it, by walking a few steps beyond your own door. We live in a little chamber on the third story, quite low enough to be an attic, so that we feel classical in our environment: and we have one of the sweetest and most motherly of Quaker women to anticipate all our wants, and make us comfortable outwardly as we are blest inwardly. James’s prospects are as good as an author’s ought to be, and I begin to fear we shall not have the satisfaction of being so very poor after all. But we are, in spite of this disappointment of our expectations, the happiest of mortals or spirits, and cling to the skirts of every passing hour, though we know the next will bring us still more joy.”[47]
The young couple had no resources save their faculty for writing. Mrs. Lowell brought no dowry, but she had poetic sensibility, and fell to translating into verse from German poetry, especially from Uhland. Lowell, with increased confidence bred of the facility with which he had dashed off the “Conversations,” and with an unfailing spring of poetry, was ready for any sort of venture. His faithful friend, Mr. Briggs, who had just launched the first number of his new literary weekly, The Broadway Journal, was eager for contributions from both. “I am very proud,” he wrote on receiving Mrs. Lowell’s translation, “The Wreath,” from the German of Uhland, to be the first to introduce her new name to the public,” and he proposed all manner of topics for Lowell to write on, such as a paper on Hawthorne and one on Emerson, for a series of articles on “Our American Prose Writers,” which had been initiated with one on the now forgotten W. A. Jones. Lowell himself complained of a native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this objection, proposed a very natural corrective:—
“There is no such stimulus to execution,” he writes, “as a sure reward. Now I would like to make a contract with you to furnish me with a column or two, or more, of prose matter, to suit yourself, in the shape of criticism, gossip, or anything else, once a week for six months or a year. You have no idea how easy a thing of this kind becomes when you know that you must do it. If you get nothing else by such an undertaking than the business habit, it would be worth your while. What will you do it for? If our means were sufficient, or success were secure, I would make you an offer that would be sufficiently tempting, but I am loath to make you one that may seem too small. Consider now, and let me know.”
Lowell’s affection for Briggs and his sympathy with him in his risky venture of a weekly literary journal made him at first well-disposed to contribute freely in response to the editor’s urgent invitation, and he was most generous in his attitude respecting payment. “You have been in business, my dear friend,” he writes to Briggs, “and know exactly how much you ought to give me with a proper regard to your own balance sheet at the end of the year. I know that your inclination will be to give me more than that. But more you ought not to give nor I to take. I leave it for you to decide. I should not like to bind myself to write every week, though I have no doubt that I shall be able to, and I have some fears that a contingent want of money may hereafter prove as sharp a spur to me as a contract.”
Mr. Briggs in reply was more explicit as to terms: “In regard to the compensation, it would be well to read Emerson’s essay on that subject. According to him, compensation is inevitable, therefore one need never give himself any trouble on the subject. Nature settles the whole business. You will be sure to receive due compensation for whatever you may do for the B. J. Poe writes for me at the rate of one dollar a column. If you will do so, I shall esteem it a capital bargain. The poetry I will pay for separately on a different principle.” Accordingly, a day or two after, Lowell wrote: “I send you the first of a series of four or five letters which you may print if you like it. If you do not like it, reject it without scruple. It may be a little too abolition for you as yet. I do not think it good at all, but Maria thinks better of it than I do (bating one or two coarse expressions in it). I do not consider it mine. I wrote it only in the hope of doing some good. So you may alter it as much as you please, if it will serve your turn. If, on the other hand, you like it, I think I may promise that the next will be better. I am in a great hurry, I have only time to say that I like your terms and am perfectly content to help you as much as I can.... I always expect to be taken at my word, so reject this without scruple.”