Bernstein (112) refers to Henry James as "the first of the last great American Island-oriented writers"
he transformed "by that most exquisite of implosions all that Island English had meant or would ever mean again, so that the syntax of his work is an elegy for all that could no longer be, a plunging deep into infinite regress of nuance, shades of gloss and glosses of shade, till in the last and greatest works all contact with that daily island life transubstantiated into crystallized reflections: the sublime artifice of infinite pains"