Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

[179] more probably it goes back to Rousseau in France; hardly, I should think to Petrarch, to whom Lowell is disposed to attribute it, and who certainly exerted very little influence in the way of sentimentality on his friend Chaucer. But the Byronic atmosphere certainly spread to Germany, as may be seen by the place conceded to that poet in Goethe's ‘Faust;’ although Goethe's ‘Werther,’ and Schiller's ‘Die Rauber’ showed that the tendency itself was at one time indigenous everywhere. In England, Bulwer and the younger Disraeli aimed to be prose Byrons; and in Moore and Mrs. Hemans, followed by Mrs. Norton and ‘L. E. L.,’ we see the sentimental spirit in successive degrees of dilution.

All the vocal music of forty or fifty years ago —when the great German composers were but just beginning to make their power felt in this country—was of an intensely sentimental description; delightfully so, I might add, for those who were brought up to that kind of enjoyment. Moore's songs, such as ‘Believe Me if all those Endearing Young Charms,’ ‘Fly, fly from the World, O Bessy, with Me,’ ‘The ’