But the change wrought by the war was far more than a rise of new activities and a shifting of population. A totally new America grew from the ashes of the great conflict. In 1860, North and South alike were provincial and self-conscious. New York City was an enormously overgrown village, and Boston and Philadelphia and Charleston were almost as individual and as unlike one another as they had been in the days of the Revolution. There had been nothing to fuse the sections together and to bring them to a common vision. The drama of the settlement had been fierce and piteous, but it had been a great series of local episodes. The Revolution had not been a melting pot that could fuse all the sections into a unity. The war which had begun in New England had drifted southward and each battle, especially toward the end, had been largely a local affair. Until 1860, there had been no passion fierce enough to stir to the very center of their lives all of the people, to melt them into a homogeneous mass, and to pour them forth into the mold of a new individual soul among the nations. The emphasis after 1870 was not upon the State but upon the _Nation_. As early as 1867 a writer in the _North American Review_ declared that, "The influence of our recent war in developing the 'National Sentiment' of the people can hardly be overestimated."[3] Now there came national banks, national securities, a national railroad, a national college system,--everywhere a widening horizon. Provincialism was dying in every part of the land. Until 1860, America had been full of the discordant individuality of youth. Its characteristics, all of them, had been characteristics of that turbulent, unsettled period before character had hardened into its final form. From 1820 to 1860 the nation was adolescent. In everything at least that concerned its intellectual life it was imitative and dependent. It was in its awkward era, and like every youth was uncouth and sensitive and self-conscious. It asked eagerly of every foreign visitor, "And what do you think of us?" and when the answer, as in the case of Moore or Marryat or Dickens, was critical, it flew into a passion. It was sentimental to silliness. As late as 1875 the editor of _Scribner's_ declared that a large number of all the manuscripts submitted to publishing houses and periodicals were declined because of their sentimentality, and most of the published literature of the time, he added, has "a vast deal of sentimentality sugared through it." That was in 1875; a few years before that date Griswold had published his _Female Poets of America_, and there had flourished the _Token_, the _Forget-Me-Not_, and the _Amaranth_. Adolescence is always sad: And I think as I sit alone, While the night wind is falling around, Of a cold white gleaming stone And a long, lone, grassy mound.