The Poet at the Breakfast Table | Page 4

the scientific specialists. The
entomologist, who confines himself rigidly to the study of the
coleoptera, is intended to typify this class. The subdivision of labor,
which, as we used to be told, required fourteen different workmen to
make a single pin, has reached all branches of knowledge. We find new
terms in all the Professions, implying that special provinces have been
marked off, each having its own school of students. In theology we
have many curious subdivisions; among the rest eschatology, that is to
say, the geography, geology, etc., of the "undiscovered country;" in
medicine, if the surgeon who deals with dislocations of the right
shoulder declines to meddle with a displacement on the other side, we
are not surprised, but ring the bell of the practitioner who devotes
himself to injuries of the left shoulder.
On the other hand, we have had or have the encyclopaedic

intelligences like Cuvier, Buckle, and more emphatically Herbert
Spencer, who take all knowledge, or large fields of it, to be their
province. The author of "Thoughts on the Universe" has something in
common with these, but he appears also to have a good deal about him
of what we call the humorist; that is, an individual with a somewhat
heterogeneous personality, in which various distinctly human elements
are mixed together, so as to form a kind of coherent and sometimes
pleasing whole, which is to a symmetrical character as a breccia is to a
mosaic.
As for the Young Astronomer, his rhythmical discourse may be taken
as expressing the reaction of what some would call "the natural man"

against the unnatural beliefs which he found in that lower world to
which be descended by day from his midnight home in the firmament.
I have endeavored to give fair play to the protest of gentle and
reverential conservatism in the letter of the Lady, which was not copied
from, but suggested by, one which I received long ago from a lady
bearing an honored name, and which I read thoughtfully and with
profound respect.
December, 1882.
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.
It is now nearly twenty years since this book was published. Being the
third of the Breakfast-Table series, it could hardly be expected to attract
so much attention as the earlier volumes. Still, I had no reason to be
disappointed with its reception. It took its place with the others, and
was in some points a clearer exposition of my views and feelings than
either of the other books, its predecessors. The poems "Homesick in
Heaven" and the longer group of passages coming from the midnight
reveries of the Young Astronomer have thoughts in them not so fully
expressed elsewhere in my writings.
The first of these two poems is at war with our common modes of
thought. In looking forward to rejoining in a future state those whom
we have loved on earth,--as most of us hope and many of us believe we
shall,--we are apt to forget that the same individuality is remembered
by one relative as a babe, by another as an adult in the strength of
maturity, and by a third as a wreck with little left except its infirmities
and its affections. The main thought of this poem is a painful one to
some persons. They have so closely associated life with its accidents
that they expect to see their departed friends in the costume of the time
in which they best remember them, and feel as if they should meet the
spirit of their grandfather with his wig and cane, as they habitually
recall him to memory.
The process of scientific specialization referred to and illustrated in this
record has been going on more actively than ever during these last

twenty years. We have only to look over the lists of the Faculties and
teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out
as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it exactness,
exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction, with
such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of partial
blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is
idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the
Grammarian." We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To
be the supreme authority on anything is a satisfaction to self-love next
door to the precious delusions of dementia. I have never pictured a
character more contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.
BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.
O. W. H.
THE POET
AT THE
BREAKFAST-TABLE.
I
The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure. But
then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time to
find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside