Frederick Law Olmsted wrote to him: "If you can't write fully half of 'The Week' and half the leaders, and control the drift and tone of the whole while living at Cambridge, give up the professorship, for _The Nation_ is worth many professorships. It is a question of loyalty over a question of comfort." Lowell wrote to him in the same strain: "_Stay_ if the two things are incompatible. We may find another professor by and by ... but we can't find another editor for _The Nation_." From Germany, John Bigelow sent a characteristic message: "Tell the University to require each student to take a copy of _The Nation_. Do not profess history for them in any other way. I dare say your lectures would be good, but why limit your pupils to hundreds which are now counted by thousands?"[187] As is well known, Godkin relinquished the idea of the college connection and stuck to his job, although the quiet and serenity of a professor's life in Cambridge contrasted with his own turbulent days appealed to him powerfully. "Ten years hence," he wrote to Norton, "if things go on as they are now I shall be the most odious man in America. Not that I shall not have plenty of friends, but my enemies will be far more numerous and active." Six years after he had founded _The Nation_, and one year after he had declined the Harvard professorship, when he was yet but forty years old, he gave this humorously exaggerated account of his physical failings due to his nervous strain: "I began _The Nation_ young, handsome, and fascinating, and am now withered and somewhat broken, rheumatism gaining on me rapidly, my complexion ruined, as also my figure, for I am growing stout."[188] But his choice between the Harvard professorship and _The Nation_ was a wise one. He was a born writer of paragraphs and editorials. The files of _The Nation_ are his monument. A crown of his laborious days is the tribute of James Bryce: "_The Nation_ was the best weekly not only in America but in the world."[189]