It was the voice of the school that had ruled the mid century, a school that was still alive and was still a dominating force of which young writers were tremendously conscious. The reading public was not prepared for the new realism: it had been nurtured on _The Token_ and _The Talisman_. The new must come not as a revolution, swift and sudden; but as an evolution, slow and imperceptible. During the seventies even Howells and James were romancers; romancers, however, in process of change. For the seventies in the history of American fiction was a period of compromise and transition. The new school would be romantic and yet at the same time it would be realistic. The way opened unexpectedly. The widening of the American horizon, the sudden vogue of the Pike literature, the new exploiting of the continent in all its wild nooks and isolated neighborhoods--strange areas as unknown to the East as the California mines and the canebrakes of the great river--and above all the emergence of the South, brought with it another discovery: Hawthorne and the mid-century school had declared romance with American background impossible simply because in their provincial narrowness they had supposed that America was bounded on the south and west by the Atlantic and the Hudson. America was discovered to be full of romantic material. It had a past not connected at all with the Knickerbockers or even the Pilgrims. Behind whole vast areas of it lay the shadow of old forgotten régimes, "picturesque and gloomy wrongs," with ruins and mystery and vague tradition. One of the earliest results, then, of the new realism, strangely enough, was a new romanticism, new American provinces added to the bounds of Arcady. The first gold of it, appropriately enough, came from California, where Harte and Mrs. Jackson caught glimpses of an old Spanish civilization alive only in the picturesque ruins of its Missions. Quickly it was found again, rich and abundant, in New Orleans, where Spain and then France had held dominion in a vague past; then in the plantations of the old South where Page and others caught the last glories of that fading cavalier civilization which had been prolonged through a century of twilight by the archaic institution of slavery; and then even in the spick-and-span new central West with its traditions of a chivalrous old French régime.