"We know very little about a talent," this younger James has written in his essay on Stevenson, "till we know where it grew up." The James family, we know, grew up outside the New England environment, in the State of New York--first at Albany, where the future novelist was born in 1843, then until he was twelve in New York City. But this in reality tells us nothing. The boy grew up in London rather than New York. The father had inherited means that permitted a retired and scholarly life. Following the birth of Henry, his second son, he had taken his family for a year and a half to England, and he had come back, both he and his wife, to quote his son's words, "completely Europeanized." "Had _all_ their talk for its subject, in my infant ears, that happy time?--did it deal only with London and Piccadilly and the Green Park?... I saw my parents homesick, as I conceived, for the ancient order."[93] He grew up in the presence of imported books and papers, the smell of whose ink fresh from London and the Strand fed his imagination. Even his playmates transported him into the old world. It was one Louis De Coppet, a small boy, "straight from the Lake of Geneva," that first really aroused in him "the sense of Europe ... that pointed prefigurement of the manners of 'Europe,' which, inserted wedge-like, if not to say peg-like, into my young allegiance was to split the tender organ into such unequal halves. His the toy hammer that drove in the very point of the golden nail. It was as if there had been a mild magic in that breath, however scant, of another world."[94] While other lads were reading their juveniles, the young James was poring over _Punch_. "From about 1850 to 1855," he writes in his essay on Du Maurier, speaking of himself in the third person, "he lived, in imagination, no small part of the time, in the world represented by the pencil of Leech.... These things were the features of a world which he longed so to behold that the familiar woodcuts grew at last as real to him as the furniture of his home." II Such was the early environment of Henry James. Refinement and rare culture breathed upon his cradle and surrounded his whole boyhood like an atmosphere. He was kept sheltered from the world without, as from something coarse and degrading. He was not allowed to attend the public schools. "Considering with much pity our four stout boys," the father wrote to Emerson in 1849, "who have no playroom within doors and import shocking bad manners from the street, we gravely ponder whether it wouldn't be better to go abroad for a few years with them, allowing them to absorb French and German and get such a sensuous education as they cannot get here."[95]