It is hard to write when one is first married. The Jews gave a man a year’s vacation. I hope to serve you sooner, and meanwhile remain Your loving friend, J. R. L. P. S. Maria and I both like the _Journal_ exceedingly. The other vehicle for Lowell’s more exclusively literary work during the winter of 1845 was _Graham’s Magazine_, published in Philadelphia. He had been a contributor since the spring of 1841, when he used the signature “H. Perceval,” which he had been employing in initial form in the _Southern Literary Messenger_. His contributions were all poems, some of which he had preserved in the two volumes already published, but in the number for February, 1845, there appeared his biographical and critical sketch of Poe in the series “Our Contributors,” which ran for a score of numbers and was accompanied by steel portraits. Graham was desirous of including Lowell in the series with a portrait by Page, but for some reason the plan fell through. In this sketch of Poe, Lowell used a discursive manner, giving expression in a lively fashion to his judgments of other poets in the past, but not hesitating to speak emphatically of the genius of Poe, whom he did not know personally. “Mr. Poe,” he wrote, “is at once the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America. It may be that we should qualify our remarks a little, and say that he _might be_, rather than that he always _is_, for he seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic acid for his inkstand.... Mr. Poe has that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius.”