1
The American Scene
Henry James
1907
Contents
I. New England: An Autumn Impression
II. New York Revisited
III. New York and The Hudson: A Spring Impression
IV. New York: Social Notes
V. The Bowery and Thereabouts
VI. The Sense of Newport
VII. Boston
VIII. Concord and Salem
IX. Philadelphia
X. Baltimore
XI. Washington
XII. Richmond
XIII. Charleston
XIV. Florida
PREFACE
THE following pages duly explain themselves, I judge, as to the Author's point of view and his relation to his subject; but I prefix this word on the chance of any suspected or perceived failure of such references. My visit to America had been the first possible to me for nearly a quarter of a century, and I had before my last previous one, brief and distant to memory, spent other years in continuous absence; so that I was to return with much of the freshness of eye, outward and inward, which, with the further contribution of a state of desire, is commonly held a precious agent of perception. I felt no doubt, I confess, of my great advantage on that score; since if I had had time to become almost as "fresh" as an inquiring stranger, I had not on the other hand had enough to cease to be, or at least to feel, as acute as an initiated native. I made no scruple of my conviction that I should understand and should care better and more than the most earnest of visitors, and yet that I should vibrate with more curiosity--on the extent of ground, that is, on which I might aspire to intimate intelligence at all--than the pilgrim with the longest list of questions, the sharpest appetite for explanations and