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 PREFACE

four tales comprising this volume are printed now for the first time in America in book form. All of them were written by Henry James before he had attained his twenty-fifth year. They are remarkable for their maturity of thought and clarity of style.

It has been the general opinion that James, like George Eliot, achieved his literary development rather slowly, since it was known that he was thirty-two years of age when "The Passionate Pilgrim," his first collection of tales, and "Rodrick Hudson," his first long novel, were published. As a matter of fact, however, James had been writing for the leading magazines since he was twenty-two. The first story in this volume, "A Landscape Painter," appeared in the Atlantic Monthly for February, 1866, and was the second story James had published up to that time.

The tales in this volume are among the most precious in our literature, and James himself thought 1