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 out to see what is in them.  One brings to light all sorts of personal property he had forgotten in his inventory.