Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

‘ [181] Grey.’ In the latter, all the heights of foppery and persiflage did but set off what was then regarded as the unsurpassable pathos of ‘Violet Fane's’ death; and though the consummate dandyism of the companion book had no such relief, yet Bulwer amply made up for it by the rivers of tears that were shed over his ‘Pilgrims of the Rhine.’ Not a young lover of the period who had acquired a decent sentimental education, but was sure to put a flower between the leaves of that work where the author says: ‘Is there one of us who has not known a being for whom it would seem none too wild a fantasy, to indulge such a dream?’ Yes, yes, Bulwer! interpreter of one's visions, everybody had known such an object of emotion; and a thousand plain Susans and Sarahs stood forever enshrined in that romantic creation—‘the beautiful ideal of the world’—when death, or a luckier lover, or parental obduracy, or the mere accident of a family removal from New York to Cincinnati, had banished them from the regions of every day. Far be it from me to speak with disrespect of these emotions; it will presently be shown that they had many advantages;