In 1854 he began printing the famous ‘Easy Chair’ papers in ‘Harper’s Monthly,’ and in 1857 the department of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ called ‘The Lounger.’ The latter was a frank imitation in part of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_, even to the letters from lady correspondents such as Nelly Lancer, Sabina Griddle, and Xantippe. During the ten years following his return from abroad Curtis published six books: _Nile Notes of a Howadji_, 1851; _The Howadji in Syria_, 1852; _Lotus-Eating_, 1852; _The Potiphar Papers_, 1853; _Prue and I_, 1857; _Trumps_, 1861. His ambitions had hitherto been chiefly literary. To be sure, in 1856, at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, he had given his address on ‘The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times,’ and had followed it with his oration on ‘Patriotism’ and his lecture on ‘The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question.’[58] He had taken the stump for Frémont in 1856, and been a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1860, where his courage, adroitness, and impassioned eloquence had saved the platform at a moment when it needed salvation. Nevertheless it may be said that the first ten years of Curtis’s life as a writer and speaker were ‘literary’ with a strong emphasis on politics, and that the last thirty years were political with an undiminished interest in letters. On Thanksgiving Day, 1856, Curtis married Anna Shaw, a daughter of F. G. Shaw, formerly of West Roxbury, and a sister of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw. He had made her acquaintance at Brook Farm twelve years earlier. There is a pretty reference to her in one of his letters to Dwight written in 1844. Curtis had been in Boston for the day: ‘Anna Shaw and Rose Russell passed me like beautiful spirits; one like a fresh morning, the other like an oriental night.’ In 1863 Curtis became the political editor of ‘Harper’s Weekly’ with the proviso that he was to have a free hand. He represented political ideals than which there can be no higher; his discussions were marked by absolute frankness, joined to perfect courtesy. The parts which fell to him in the drama of political life were always important and often conspicuous. He was a delegate both to National and to State conventions, and a delegate-at-large to the convention for revising the State constitution of New York. Although ‘nominated by acclamation’ for Secretary of the State of New York (1869), he refused to serve. He did allow his name to be presented for governor in the convention of 1870, supposing all to be in good faith; but when he discovered that he was the victim of a trick,--the object being to defeat Greeley,--he withdrew.[59]