His first published work, _The Story of a Year_, which appeared in the March, 1865, number of the _Atlantic_, at first reading seems little different from the hundreds of tales of the Civil War that were appearing everywhere during the period. It is full of a young man's smartness and literary affectations: "In early May, two years ago, a young couple I wot of," etc. "Good reader, this narrative is averse to retrospect," etc. And yet the story, despite its youthfulness, contains all the elements that we now associate with the fiction of Henry James. It is first of all a slight story--not so slight as some of the later work, but nevertheless a mere episode expanded into a novelette; furthermore, it was written not so much for the displaying of movement of incident as for the analysis of movements of feeling and the growth of elements of character: "I have to chronicle," he says at one point, "another silent transition." Then too its ending suggests the French school: "No, no, no," she almost shrieked, turning about in the path. "I forbid you to follow me." But for all that he went in. We stand uncertain, startled, piqued--then the suggestion comes surging over us: Perhaps the author means that she married him after all! Could she do it? Did she do it? And then we find with a thrill of surprise that he has given us the full answer in his previous analysis of her character. It is finesse, it is the careful adjustment of parts, it is deliberate art. There are other characteristics in the story that were to mark all the work of James. The tale, for instance, leaves us unmoved. We admire its brilliancy, but at no point does it grip us with its tragedy or its comedy. The faithlessness of the heroine and the death of the hero alike leave us cold. We do not care. Sympathy, the sympathy of comprehension, that sympathy that enters into the little world the author has created and for a time loses itself as if it were actually native there--of this there is nothing. It is all objective, external phenomena observed and recorded on a pad--a thing alone of the intellect.