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 Charles Sumner, I invited Bryant and Bayard Taylor.  I knew that Bryant held a little bitterness against Lowell for the passage in the “Fable for Critics,” in which he said:—­

  “If he stir you at all, it is just, on my soul,
  Like being stirred up with the very North Pole;”

and I told Lowell how the dear old poet felt, and then put them together at the table.  Lowell laid himself out to captivate Bryant, and did so completely, for his tact was such that in society no one whom he desired to interest could resist him; and our dinner was a splendid success.  Of all present at it only Durand and myself are now living.

The subscription list of our paper had risen in the first month to above 1200, and the promise for the future seemed brilliant.  But, unfortunately, neither of us understood the business part of journalism, or that a paper does not live by its circulation, but by advertisements; and that our advertisements, being a specialty, must be canvassed for vigorously.  We did not canvass.  Cunning publishers persuaded us that it would be a good thing to take their advertisements for nothing, so as to persuade the others that we had a good advertising list.  But the bait never took, and we never got the paying list, and the printer, being interested in our expenditure, never helped us to economize, but played the “Wicked Uncle” to our “Babes in the Wood,” and so we wasted our substance.  It was, perhaps, fortunate that the funds ran short as they did, for our five thousand dollars could not go far when the subscriptions were all paid in and spent, and the overwork began to tell on me fatally.  With the conclusion of the third volume I broke down and had to give up work entirely.