Image: Mike Baird

The American Scene, that itinerary of his brilliantly melancholy return to America, took Henry James through New York and New England, down into the cities of the Eastern Seaboard, and as far as Palm Beach. He left the journey where in a sense it left him:

There was no doubt, under the influence of this last look, that Florida still had, in her ingenuous, not at all insidious way, the secret of pleasing, and that even round about me the vagueness was still an appeal. The vagueness was warm, the vagueness was bright, the vagueness was...
 

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