It is too soon to sum up the literary history of the last quarter of a century. The writers who have given it shape are still writing, and their work is therefore incomplete. But on the slightest review of it two facts become manifest; first, that New England has lost its long monopoly; and, secondly, that a marked feature of the period is the growth of realistic fiction. The electric tension of the atmosphere for thirty years preceding the civil war, the storm and stress of great public contests, and the intellectual stir produced by transcendentalism seem to have been more favorable to poetry and literary idealism than present conditions are. At all events there are no new poets who rank with Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, and others of the elder generation, although George H. Boker, in Philadelphia, R. H. Stoddard and E. C. Stedman, in New York, and T. B. Aldrich, first in New York and afterward in Boston, have written creditable verse; not to speak of younger writers, whose work, however, for the most part, has been more distinguished by delicacy of execution than by native impulse. Mention has been made of the establishment of _Harper's Monthly Magazine_, which, under the conduct of its accomplished editor, George W. Curtis, has provided the public with an abundance of good reading. The old _Putnam's Monthly_, which ran from 1853 to 1858, and had a strong corps of contributors, was revived in 1868, and continued by that name till 1870, when it was succeeded by _Scribner's Monthly_, under the editorship of Dr. J. G. Holland, and this in 1881 by the _Century_, an efficient rival of _Harper's_ in circulation, in literary excellence, and in the beauty of its wood-engravings, the American school of which art these two great periodicals have done much to develop and encourage. Another New York monthly, the _Galaxy_, ran from 1866 to 1878, and was edited by Richard Grant White. Within the last few years a new _Scribner's Magazine_ has also taken the field. The _Atlantic_, in Boston, and _Lippincott's_, in Philadelphia, are no unworthy competitors with these for public favor. During the forties began a new era of national expansion, somewhat resembling that described in a former chapter, and, like that, bearing fruit eventually in literature. The cession of Florida to the United States in 1845, and the annexation of Texas in the same year, were followed by the purchase of California in 1847, and its admission as a State in 1850. In 1849 came the great rush to the California gold fields. San Francisco, at first a mere collection of tents and board shanties, with a few adobe huts, grew with incredible rapidity into a great city--the wicked and wonderful city apostrophized by Bret Harte in his poem, _San Francisco_: "Serene, indifferent of fate, Thou sittest at the Western Gate; Upon thy heights so lately won Still slant the banners of the sun. . . . I know thy cunning and thy greed, Thy hard, high lust and willful deed."