forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher
can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would
think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along
with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper
of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain
brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less
intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not
mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the
world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings
in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest
calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler.
The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I
could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,
I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in
the visible measure of it.

In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might
belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that
friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew
how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and
the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are
only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that
morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten
blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the
fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was
unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out
through leaves and flowers upon the river's coming and going tides, and