that it would furnish me with a sufficient
income to enable me to follow my painting without any anxiety as to my
means of living. We started a weekly called "The Crayon," and at
the outset I was able to promise the assistance of most of our best
writers residing in New York.

In order to secure the support of the Bostonians I went to Boston and
Cambridge, where I was met by a cordial response to my enthusiasm,
Lowell becoming my sponsor to the circle of which he was then and for
many years the most brilliant ornament. To him and his friendship in
after years I owe to a very large degree the shaping of my later life,
as well as the better part of the success of "The Crayon." He was then
in a condition of profound melancholy, from the recent death of his
wife. He lived in retirement, seeing only his most intimate friends,
and why he should have made an exception in my case I do not quite
understand. It may be that I had a card of introduction from his great
friend William Page or from C.F. Briggs (in the literary world, "Harry
Franco"), but if so it would have been merely a formal introduction,
as my acquaintance with either of those gentlemen was very slight,
and I do not remember an introduction at all. My impression is that I
introduced myself. But I was an enthusiast, fired with the idea of an
apostolate of art, largely vicarious and due to Ruskin, who was then
my prophet, and whose religion, as mine, was nature. In fact, I was
still so much under the influence of the "Modern Painters" that, like
Ruskin, I accepted art as something in the peculiar vision of the
artist, not yet recognizing that it is the brain that sees and not the
eye. But there is this which makes the nature-worshiper's creed a more
exalting one than that of the art-lover, that it is impersonal and
compels the forgetting of one's self, which for an apostolate is
essential.

It was probably this characteristic of my condition which enlisted the
sympathy of Lowell, who, even in his desolation, had a heart for any
form of devotion, and who, with the love of nature which was one of
his own most marked traits, had a side to which my enthusiasm appealed
directly. The mere artist is, unless his nature is a radically
religious one, an egotist, and his art necessarily centres on him,
nature only furnishing him with material. I was dreaming of other
things than myself or that which was personal in my enterprise, and
Lowell felt the glow of my enthusiasm. H