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."}
{"Imagination", remains an amusing and cleverly-
plotted story of a young girl whose imagination
gets the better of her, presumably because of
reading romantic novels. This, of course, was a
commonplace notion in the 1820s, except that
Cooper's heroine, misled by circumstances, comes
to believe that her romantic fantasies are
happening. This Don Quixote-like twist is less
common, though Jane Austen's famous "Northanger
Abbey" and Eaton Stannard Barrett's little-known
but very funny "The Heroine; or, Adventures of
Cherubina" (1813) fall within the genre. "Heart", a
slim (indeed, truncated) account of faithful love,
sinks into bathos; it is, perhaps, most interesting
for its opening scene of a blase New York City
crowd gathering around a fallen man -- and doing
nothing to help him.
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