The magazine appeared about the first of November, and on the 19th Lowell wrote to Emerson: “You have seen, no doubt, how the Philistines have been parodying your ‘Brahma,’ and showing how they still believe in their special god Baal, and are unable to arrive at a conception of an omnipresent Deity. I have not yet met with a single clever one or I would have sent it to you for your amusement. Meanwhile, they are advertising the _Atlantic_ in the very best way, and Mr. Underwood tells me that the orders for the second number are doubling on those for the first. I think you will find the second an improvement.... Your poem [“Two Rivers”] is to go into No. 3, simply as a matter of housewifery, because we had already three articles at $50. I think I told you which I chose--‘Musketaquit.’ The ‘Solitude and Society’ [published in No. 2] has only one fault, that it is not longer, but had it been only a page, there would have been enough in it. Did you use the word _daysman_[119] deliberately? It has a technical meaning, and I suppose you used it in that sense. Mr. Nichols (the vermilion pencil) was outraged, and appealed to me. I answered that you had a right to use any word you liked till we found some one who wrote better English to correct you. Or did you mean the word to be merely the English of _journeyman_? “I hope you will be able to give us something more for No. 3 before you go off to lecture. The number promises well thus far, but I wish to make it a decided advance. You have no notion how hard bestead we are. Out of 297 manuscripts only at most six accepted. I begin to believe in the total depravity of contributions. “Let me thank you in especial for one line in ‘Brahma,’ which abides with me as an intimate-- ‘When me they fly, I am the wings.’ You have crammed meaning there with an hydraulic press. Will not Thoreau give us something from Moosehead?” Fourteen years earlier Lowell had welcomed Whittier as a contributor to the _Pioneer_, and now he renewed the old relation. He printed “Tritemius” in the first number and “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” in the second. Indeed, the _Atlantic_ came into existence most fortunately for Whittier, whose fortunes it helped distinctly, as it gave him a medium for the publication of his purely literary poems, and thus not only filled his pocket but helped materially to place him before the public in another guise than that of an ardent reformer. Lowell’s letter upon receipt of “Skipper Ireson’s Ride” is interesting both for its cordiality and for the contrast in tone to his manner of addressing Emerson. It may not unfairly be said that Emerson was the only one of his contemporaries whom Lowell addressed as if he were profoundly conscious of his relation to him as a pupil to his master. Lowell’s letter to Whittier is dated 4 November, 1857.[120]