Lowell himself was under no illusions. He was warmly attached to Gay, and he had a keen intellectual admiration for Edmund Quincy. He respected to the full his several associates, but he knew well that, though he identified himself cordially with the small knot of earnest men and women who cried aloud and spared not, his temperament, his ideals, and his humor forbade him to shut himself up within the bounds they set themselves. Despite the independence he claimed and that was granted him, he could not escape the sense of his restrictions. “I told you and the Executive Committee honestly before I began,” he wrote Gay, “that they were setting me about a business for which I was not fitted. I feel as if the whole of them were looking over my shoulder whenever I sit down to write, and it quite paralyzes me.” And yet ten days later he could send his poem, “The Mill,” better known as “Beaver Brook,” and write, “I am just in time for the mail now, and I positively admire myself that I can sit down and write a poem to the _Standard’s_ order so resolutely.” At the end of his first year’s engagement Lowell began to receive intimations that the paper was in a hard way financially. “I am very sorry to see,” he writes the editor, “that the _Standard_ is raised on so insecure a staff. I did not expect, (and so told the Executive Committee) that my writing for it would increase the circulation, but, I say again, as I said before, that they ought to be entirely satisfied with _you_. Not only is your own editorial work dote with spirit and vigor, but your selections are such as to render the paper one of the most interesting I see. But they ought to do something themselves. Phillips and Quincy could do a great deal if they would. They can’t expect two persons to give the paper an infinite variety, nor me to devote myself wholly to it. I have continued to write after my year was up, but I have had no intimation from the Committee whether they wished my services any longer or not. I am very willing to continue, for if I were to give up this engagement, I must find some other, in order to make the two ends meet.”