“The friends who were so generous to me must not suppose that I have not felt deeply grateful, nor that my delight at relieving myself from this pecuniary obligation is of any ungracious kind. I have been grateful all along, and am more so now than ever. This act of kindness did me an unspeakable amount of good; for it came when I most needed to be assured that anybody thought it worth while to keep me from sinking. And it did me even greater good than this, in making me sensible of the need of sterner efforts than my former ones, in order to establish a right for myself to live and be comfortable. For it is my creed (and was so even at that wretched time) that a man has no claim upon his fellow creatures, beyond bread and water, and a grave, unless he can win it by his own strength or skill. But so much the kinder were those unknown friends whom I thank again with all my heart.”[82] Aside from his modest salary from the _Standard_, Lowell’s income from his writings was meagre enough. In publishing his volumes of poetry, he appears to have been largely if not entirely at the expense of manufacture, and in the imperfectly organized condition of the book market at that time, he had himself to supervise arrangements for selling his volume of poems in New York. There are one or two hints that, after his release from contributing to the _Standard_, he contemplated some new editorial position, perhaps even meditated a fresh periodical venture. At any rate, his friend Briggs remonstrated with him, in a letter written 15 March, 1849: “Don’t, my dear friend, think of selling yourself to a weekly or monthly periodical of any kind, except as a contributor _deo volente._ The drudgery of editorship would destroy you, and bring you no profit. Make up your mind resolutely to refuse any offers, let them be never so tempting. In a mere pecuniary point of view, it would be more profitable for you to sell your writings where you could procure the best pay for them; they will be worth more and more as your wants grow.” And in December, 1850, Emerson, who was enlisting Hawthorne’s interest in a new magazine projected by Mr. George Bradburn, “that impossible problem of a New England magazine,” as he calls it, writes: “I told him to go to Lowell, who had been for a year meditating the like project.” It is possible that there was some plan for turning the _Massachusetts Quarterly Review_ into a brisker and more distinctly literary journal. At any rate, Lowell, writing to Emerson 19 February, 1850, says: “The plan seems a little more forward. I have seen Parker, who is as placable as the raven down of darkness, and not unwilling to shift his Old Man of the sea to other shoulders. Longfellow also is toward, and talks in a quite Californian manner of raising funds by voluntary subscription.”