The young couple had no resources save their faculty for writing. Mrs. Lowell brought no dowry, but she had poetic sensibility, and fell to translating into verse from German poetry, especially from Uhland. Lowell, with increased confidence bred of the facility with which he had dashed off the “Conversations,” and with an unfailing spring of poetry, was ready for any sort of venture. His faithful friend, Mr. Briggs, who had just launched the first number of his new literary weekly, _The Broadway Journal_, was eager for contributions from both. “I am very proud,” he wrote on receiving Mrs. Lowell’s translation, “The Wreath,” from the German of Uhland, to be the first to introduce her new name to the public,” and he proposed all manner of topics for Lowell to write on, such as a paper on Hawthorne and one on Emerson, for a series of articles on “Our American Prose Writers,” which had been initiated with one on the now forgotten W. A. Jones. Lowell himself complained of a native indolence, and Briggs, who was skeptical of the force of this objection, proposed a very natural corrective:-- “There is no such stimulus to execution,” he writes, “as a sure reward. Now I would like to make a contract with you to furnish me with a column or two, or more, of prose matter, to suit yourself, in the shape of criticism, gossip, or anything else, once a week for six months or a year. You have no idea how easy a thing of this kind becomes when you know that you must do it. If you get nothing else by such an undertaking than the business habit, it would be worth your while. What will you do it for? If our means were sufficient, or success were secure, I would make you an offer that would be sufficiently tempting, but I am loath to make you one that may seem too small. Consider now, and let me know.” Lowell’s affection for Briggs and his sympathy with him in his risky venture of a weekly literary journal made him at first well-disposed to contribute freely in response to the editor’s urgent invitation, and he was most generous in his attitude respecting payment. “You have been in business, my dear friend,” he writes to Briggs, “and know exactly how much you ought to give me with a proper regard to your own balance sheet at the end of the year. I know that your inclination will be to give me more than that. But more you ought not to give nor I to take. I leave it for you to decide. I should not like to bind myself to write every week, though I have no doubt that I shall be able to, and I have some fears that a contingent want of money may hereafter prove as sharp a spur to me as a contract.”