To be intimate with The Dreamer meant to adore the little wife with the face of a Luca della Robbia chorister and the voice which should have belonged to one--with the merry, irresistible ways of a perfectly happy child,--and to revere the mother.
The cottage was also found to be large enough (as the fame of its master grew) to be the destination of letters from the literary stars of the day. Longfellow and Lowell and Washington Irving, on this side of the water, and Dickens, in England, were among Edgar Poe's numerous correspondents while a dweller in the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden.
In addition to the stories, poems, essays and critiques which the indefatigable Dreamer was putting out, he found time to publish a collection of his "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque," in book form. He was also (unfortunately for him) induced to prepare a work on sea-shells for the use of schools--"The Conchologist's First Book," it was called. This was unmistakably a mere "pot-boiler" and confessedly a compilation, but it set the little authors whose namby-pamby works the self-appointed Defender of the Purity of Style in American Letters had consigned to an early grave, like a nest of hornets buzzing about his ears.
"Plagarism!" was the burden of their hum.
Even while the discordant chorus was being chanted, however, his wonderfully original tales continued to make their appearance at intervals--chiefly in _The Gentleman's Magazine_, whose editor, at "Billy" Burton's invitation, he had become.
In the midst of all this activity one of his old and most cherished dreams took more definite shape than ever before--the dream of becoming himself the founder of a magazine in which he could write as his genius and his fancy should dictate without having to be constantly making compromises with editors and proprietors--a periodical which would fulfil his ideal of magazine literature, which he predicted would be the leading literature of the future. With his prophetic eye he foresaw the high pressure under which the American of coming years would live, and he never lost an opportunity to express the opinion that the reader of the future would give preference to the essay, or story, or poem which could be read at a sitting--which would waste no time in preamble or conclusion, but in which every word would be chosen by the literary artist with the nicety with which the painter selects the exact tint he needs, and in which every word would tell. And such works he conceived it would be especially the province of the magazine to present.