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.

--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
"Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.

--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I
think about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves
they are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf
and the book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the
matter in question.

--The Member's eyes began to look heavy.

--It 's a very queer place, that receptacle a man fetches his talk out
of. The library comparison does n't exactly hit it. You stow away some
idea and don't want it, say for ten years. When it turns up at last it
has got so jammed and crushed out of shape by the other ideas packed
with it, that it is no more like what it was than a raisin is like a
grape on the vine, or a fig from a drum like one hanging on the tree.
Then, again, some kinds