“When a great thought strikes along the brain
        And flushes all the cheek.”

When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about the same; for if the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was a somewhat prouder affair than an eclectic weekly like ‘Every Saturday’, he was supreme in his place, and I was subordinate in mine.  The house was careful, in the attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with Fields himself.

We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an American literary situation.  In the end James R. Osgood failed, though all his enterprises succeeded.  The anomaly is sad, but it is not infrequent.  They were greater than his powers and his means, and before they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of longer purse and longer patience.  He was singularly fitted both by instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country.  He founded his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as the resources for rearing the superstructure.  Changes began to follow each other rapidly after he came into control of the house.  Misfortune reduced the size and number of its periodicals.  ‘The Young Folks’ was sold outright, and the ‘North American Review’ (long before Mr. Rice bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it.  His own periodical, ‘Every Saturday’, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size.  Then both the ’Atlantic Monthly’ and ‘Every Saturday’ were sold away from their old ownership, and ‘Every Saturday’ was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be of the same employ.  There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away from it, under the lamps.  We all knew that it was his necessity that had caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a boy.  We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience?  He liked our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his weight from one foot to another:  a figure pathetic now that it has gone the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed by one unkindness.