His world in reality was small. He had been reared in a cloister-like atmosphere where he had dreamed of "life" rather than lived it. It is almost pathetic to think of him going up to the Harvard Law School because in a vague way it stood for something which he had missed and longed to feel. "I thought of it under the head of 'life,'" he says. He had played in his childhood with books rather than boys; he had been kept away from his natural playmates because of their "shocking bad manners"; he had never mingled with men in a business or a professional way; he had never married; he stood aloof from life and observed it without being a part of it. Americans he knew chiefly from the specimens he had found in Europe during his long residences; European society he knew as a visitor from without. With nothing was he in sympathy in the full meaning of the word, that sympathy which includes its own self in the group under observation. For ten years he wrote studies, essays on his masters, George Eliot, Balzac, Daudet, and stories that were not greatly different from these essays--analyses of types, and social conditions, and of the reactions that follow when a unit of one social system is thrust into another. In 1875 he enlarged his area with _Roderick Hudson_, a novel of length, and he followed it with _The American_, _The Europeans_, _Daisy Miller_, and others, all of them international in setting. In his later period, the period, say, after 1890, he confined himself to the depicting of society in London, the rapid change toward unconventionality in manners that marked the end of the century. He was so far now from contact with his native land that of necessity he must cease to use it as his source of literary material.