The definite arrangement which Lowell made with the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society, who were the general managers of the _Standard_, was effected in a personal interview with Mr. Gay, who had come on to Dedham and there met Lowell. The conditions were simple and are rehearsed in a letter to Briggs, 26 March, 1848. Lowell was to receive a salary of $500 a year, and for this was to furnish a weekly contribution, either in verse or prose, but the verse was not to be restricted to direct attacks on slavery, and in his prose he now and then went outside the line of domestic politics, and occasionally even took up a distinctly literary topic. “The Committee,” writes Mr. Gay, “accepts your proviso of a termination to the arrangement whenever either party please, and accord to you any reasonable latitude in the choice of subjects that you may desire.” It was plain from the outset that Lowell was not overconfident of his ability to make the agreement one of mutual satisfaction. He felt that in his independence of thought he was not likely always to be at one with his associates, yet he was so heartily in accord with them in the fundamental doctrine of opposition to slavery, morally and politically, that he was glad of the opportunity of taking an active part in the fight. And then he undoubtedly looked to some advantage from the stimulus he should receive from the necessity of a weekly contribution. “I did not like,” he writes to Briggs, “to take pay for anti-slavery work, but as my abolitionism has cut me off from the most profitable sources of my literary emoluments, as the offer was unsolicited on my part, and as I wanted the money, I thought I had a right to take it. I have spent more than my income every year since I have been married, and that only for necessities. If I can once get clear, I think I can keep so. I do not agree with the abolitionists in their disunion and non-voting theories. They treat ideas as ignorant persons do cherries. They think them unwholesome unless they are swallowed stones and all.” The first number of the _Standard_ under this new arrangement, that for 6 April, 1848, which contained the announcement, held as Lowell’s initial contribution his “Ode to France,” which no doubt he had written without regard to this publication, for it bears date “February, 1848,” and indicates that in his study at Elmwood he was looking out on the large world, and was brooding over those great general ideas of freedom which were the intellectual and moral furniture of his being. He could exclaim:--