t
is to sketch with bungling fingers a few men and a few tendencies which
seem to characterize the age.

One result of the Civil War was picturesquely set forth in Emerson's
"Journal." The War had unrolled a map of the Union, he said, and hung
it in every man's house. There was a universal shifting of attention,
if not always from the province or section to the image of the nation
itself, at least a shift of focus from one section to another. The clash
of arms had meant many other things besides the triumph of Union and
the freedom of the slaves. It had brought men from every state into rude
jostling contact with one another and had developed a new social and
human curiosity. It may serve as another illustration of Professor
Shaler's law of tension and release. The one overshadowing issue which
had absorbed so much thought and imagination and energy had suddenly
disappeared. Other shadows were to gather, of course. Reconstruction of
the South was one of them, and the vast economic and industrial changes
that followed the opening of the New West were to bring fresh problems
almost as intricate as the question of slavery had been. But for the
moment no one thought of these things. The South accepted defeat as
superbly as she had fought, and began to plough once more. The jubilant
North went back to work--to build transcontinental railroads, to
organize great industries, and to create new states.

The significant American literature of the first decade after the close
of the War is not in the books dealing directly with themes involved
in the War itself. It is rather the literature of this new release of
energy, the new curiosity as to hitherto unknown sections, the new humor
and romance. Fred Lewis Pattee, the author of an admirable "History of
American Literature since 1870," uses scarcely too strong a phrase when
he entitles this period "The Second Discovery of America"; and he quotes
effectively from Mark Twain, who was himself one of these discoverers:
"The eight years in America from 1860 to 1868 uprooted institutions that
were centuries old, changed the politics of a people, transformed the
social life of half the country, and wrought so profoundly upon the
entire national character that the influence cannot be measured short of
two or three generations."

Let us begin with the West, and with that joyous stage-coach journey of
young Samuel L. Clemens across the plains to Nevada in 1861, which he
describes in "Rou