Tales for Fifteen; Or, Imagination and Heart

Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart.
by James Fenimore Cooper (writing under the pseudonym of Jane Morgan )
{This text has been transcribed and annotated from a facsimile of the original edition (New York: C. Wiley, iv, 223 pp., 1823) by Hugh C. MacDougall, Secretary of the James Fenimore Cooper Society <jfcooper@wpe.com>, who welcomes corrections or emendations. Only a handful of copies of the original edition have survived. The standard Cooper bibliography makes brief mention of an edition published in Guernsey, Maryland (n.d.), but I have never seen any further reference to it. Forty years ago a facsimile of the Wiley edition was published (Delmar, NY: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints, 1959, reprinted 1977), with an introduction by James Franklin Beard. At least one microfilm version is also available, but Tales for Fifteen remains one of James Fenimore Cooper's least read and least known writings.}
{In 1840, when the Boston publisher George Roberts asked Cooper for a contribution to a new magazine, Cooper responded that he could reprint Tales for Fifteen if he could find a copy—Cooper himself didn't have one. Roberts found a copy in New York, and Imagination was reprinted in his Boston Notion (January 30, 1841), and in his Roberts' Semi-Monthly Magazine (Boston, February 1 and 15, 1841). Shortly thereafer, he also reprinted Heart , in the Boston Notion (March 13 and 20, 1841) and in Roberts' Semi-Monthly Magazine (April 1 and 15, 1841).}
{Introductory Note: Tales for Fifteen was apparently written in 1821, when Cooper became afflicted with writer's block while composing his first best-selling novel, The Spy . Cooper had envisaged a series of five stories, to be called American Tales, and which were to deal respectively with Imagination , Heart , Matter , Manner , and Matter and Manner . Only Imagination was completed; the half-written Heart was given a sudden and half-hearted ending; Cooper later asserted that he had allowed Charles Wiley to publish Tales for Fifteen to help him out of some financial difficulties. In a letter to George Roberts in 1840, Cooper said of Imagination that this tale was written on rainy day, half asleep and half awake, but I retain rather a favorable impression of it. }