Lowell was highly entertained by this proposal. “I could not help laughing,” he wrote, “as I read your proposed disposition of the expected finances. To look at you in the character of Alnaschar was something so novel as to be quite captivating to my imagination. Not that I have any fear that you will kick over the basket, but I am afraid the contents will hardly be so attractive to the public as to allow the proceeds of the sale to be divided into three. It is really quite a triumph to be able to laugh at my practical friend. However, I will not impoverish your future, but will let you enjoy it as long as it lasts.... I have now, in addition to what I sent you, and exclusive of Emerson, etc., about a hundred lines written, chiefly about Willis and Longfellow. But in your arrangements with the printer, you must reckon on allowing me at least a month. I cannot write unless in the mood.” It was when about half the poem had been written that Lowell began his constant work for the _Standard_, and he was impatient to finish the poem, yet found it hard to get into the right mood. “I want to get my windows open,” he wrote to Briggs, 26 March, 1848, “and to write in the fresh air. I ought not to have sent you any part of it till I had finished it entirely. I feel a sense of responsibility which hinders my pen from running along as it ought in such a theme. I wish the last half to be as jolly and unconstrained as the first. If you had not praised what I sent you, I dare say you would have had the whole of it ere this. Praise is the only thing that can make me feel any doubt of myself.” And then, recurring to Briggs’s air castle to be built with the proceeds: “As to your plan for dividing the profits I will have nothing to do with it. I wish they might be a thousand dollars with all my heart, but I do not see that they will be more than enough to buy something for my little niece there in New York. If I had not thought it the only poem I ever wrote on which there was like to be _some_ immediate profit, I should never have given it to you at all. In making it a present to you, I was giving myself a _douceur_, and the greater the sale the larger the bribe to myself. A part of the condition is that if it make a loss--I pay it. If this be not agreed to, the bargain is null, and I never will finish it.... Now that I _have_ let you into the secret of the ‘Fable’ before it was finished, I hope you will write and give me a spur. I suppose you did not wish to say anything about it till after it became yours. But I wish to be dunned. Tell me whether its being published at any particular time will make any difference, etc., etc., and make any suggestions. I think I shall say nothing about Margaret Fuller (though she offer so fair a target), because she has done me an ill-natured turn.[69] I shall revenge myself amply upon her by writing better. She is a very foolish, conceited woman, who has got