

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Poet at the Breakfast Table
by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.,

(The Physician and Poet, not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)

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Title: The Poet at the Breakfast Table

Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

Release Date: August 15, 2006 [EBook #2666]
Last Updated: October 28, 2012

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE ***

Produced by David Widger

THE POET
AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE

by Oliver Wendell Holmes

CONTENTS

PREFACE.

PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION.

THE POET AT THE BREAKFAST-TABLE.

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

VIII

IX

X

XI

XII

PREFACE.

In this, the third series of Breakfast-Table conversations, a slight dramatic background shows off a few talkers and writers, aided by certain silent supernumeraries. The machinery is much like that of the two preceding series. Some of the characters must seem like old acquaintances to those who have read the former papers. As I read these over for the first time for a number of years, I notice one character; presenting a class of beings who have greatly multiplied during the interval which separates the earlier and later Breakfast-Table papers,—I mean 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