he is the tallest of fowls, land or water, of a most singular shape, and
has black-tipped crimson wings folded under his delicate rose-colored
plumage? These other books referred to, written, let us say, from thirty
or forty years to a century or two ago, amuse us in a way their poor
dead authors never intended. Most amusing are the dead ones who take
themselves seriously, whose books are pulpits quaintly carved and
decorated with precious stones and silken canopies in which they stand
and preach to or at their contemporaries._

_In like manner, in going through this book of mine after so many years I
am amused at the way it is colored by the little cults and crazes, and
modes of thought of the 'eighties of the last century. They were so
important then, and now, if remembered at all, they appear so trivial!
It pleases me to be diverted in this way at "A Crystal Age"--to find, in
fact, that I have not stood still while the world has been moving._

_This criticism refers to the case, the habit, of the book rather than
to its spirit, since when we write we do, as the red man thought, impart
something of our souls to the paper, and it is probable that if I were
to write a new dream of the future it would, though in some respects
very different from this, still be a dream and picture of the human race
in its forest period._

_Alas that in this case the wish cannot induce belief! For now I remember
another thing which Nature said--that earthly excellence can come in no
way but one, and the ending of passion and strife is the beginning of
decay. It is indeed a hard saying, and the hardest lesson we can learn
of her without losing love and bidding good-by forever to hope._

W. H. H.