in reply to questions put by the readers,
and warmly applauded its tone. Mantz was our French correspondent,
and William Rossetti our English, and a few of the artists sent us
communications which had the value of the personal artistic tone. But
I learned the meaning of the fable of "The Lark and her Young," for
the general assistance in the matter of contributions, promised me by
the friends who had originally urged me to the undertaking, was very
slow in coming, and, for the first numbers, I wrote nearly the whole
of the original matter, and for some time more than half of it. I
wrote not only the editorial articles and the criticisms, but essays,
correspondence, poetry, book notices (really reading every book I
noticed), and a page or two of "Sketchings," in which were notes from
nature, extracts from letters, and replies to queries of the readers.

I remained in the city all the burning summer, taking a ten days' run
in the Adirondacks in September. I kept office all day, received
all who came to talk art or business, and did most of my writing at
night,--not a regime to keep up one's working powers. Durand did some
excellent translations from the French, and the late Justin Winsor
sent us many translations, both of verse and prose, from the German,
as well as original poetry. Aldrich was a generous contributor.
Whittier, Bayard Taylor, and others of the lyric race sent occasional
contributions, and amongst the women, who were, as a rule, our most
enthusiastic supporters, were Mrs. Sigourney, and, not the least by
far, Lucy Larcom, the truest poetess of that day in America, who gave
us some of her most charming poems. She was teacher in a girls'
school somewhere in Massachusetts, and I went to see her in one of my
editorial trips. We went out for a walk in the fields, she and her
class and myself, and they looked up to me as if I were Apollo and
they the Muses; and we went afield in many things. Henry James, the
father of the novelist, was also a not infrequent contributor; and,
amongst the artists, Huntington, President Durand (the father of my
associate), Horatio Greenough, and William Page appeared in our pages,
with many more, whose names a file of "The Crayon" would recall.

During the year, Lowell received the appointment of Professor of
Modern Languages at Harvard, and on the eve of his sailing from New
York we gave him a dinner, to which, besides some of his old friends,
such as E.P. Whipple and Senator Ch