In one point of excellence Lowell was exceedingly particular. He told me once in later life, when we were discussing a proposed reissue of the British Poets, of which he was to be editor-in-chief, that I must not think he would accept any one’s proof-reading but his own. “I am really a very careful proof-reader,” he said, “though people fancy I am too indolent for such work.” In a letter to Mr. Norton, 18 October, 1859, presaging some changes, he writes: “As to proofs, I _must_ read those myself, or I don’t feel safe. Yet a piece of bad grammar got into the October number in spite of Mr. Nichols and me together.” He had, indeed, a most admirable aid in Mr. George Nichols, who was a vigilant officer, carrying a search warrant for any and all literary misdemeanors. The _Atlantic_ at this time was printed at Riverside, and there is a charming description, in a letter which Mr. Norton prints,[128] of the morning walk which Lowell was wont to take to the Press by the footpath that lay along the river bank. The pressure upon Lowell, which his college work and his editorship brought, did, during these four years, stop, somewhat, his spontaneity. He wrote but few poems, and his letters show the effort he needed to make to force some gayety. “I am that man among mortals,” he wrote to Miss Norton, “whose friends must forgive him the most treasons against friendship,--silence, staying away, dulness when he writes or comes--and I know not what else,--yet I do believe that my heart holds fire as long as another, and that I neither grow cool nor forget sooner than most. I cannot write unless I feel as if I could give the best part of myself to those who deserve it best, and I am so forever busy that I am either employed or weary, and who can write then? I believe that none but an idle man can write a good letter. I mean by idle, a man who is not under the necessity of tapping his brain on the public side, and tapping so freely that the runnings on the other cannot be sprightly for want of _head_. This is why women are such good letter-writers. Their ordinary employments do not suck them dry of all communicativeness,--I can’t think of any other word,--and their writing is their play, as it should be. As for me, nowadays, taking up my pen is only the reminder of work. This that I write with is one worn to a stump with my lectures three years--four years ago. I would not write with the same one I had used for Mr. Cushing and drudgery. So the fault is not in the quill that I am stupid. If I had only been laid away in a drawer these four years, as it had been! What a fury I should be in to declare myself on all manner of topics! But this exhaustion one feels from overwork extends itself to the receptive faculties as well. A dry sponge floats and is long in saturating. The mind, I think, goes even beyond this--it must be _full_ to take up more.”