Thomas Wentworth Higginson, The new world and the new book

‘ [180] Harp that once through Tara's Halls,’ and a score of others, set the popular key-note; and even his hymns, such as ‘Come, Ye Disconsolate,’ had a similar flavor. The whole vocal literature of the day held the same pitch. Such songs as ‘Go Thou and dream,’ ‘Take hence the Bowl,’ ‘My Soul is Dark,’ ‘The Evening Gun,’ ‘Those Fairy Bells,’ were sung in every drawing-room, by a class of private singers more impassioned and more ardently dramatic than one now hears anywhere, and whose singing afforded a training in the emotional such as no experience of to-day can give. Their strength would now be considered a weakness; the exquisite German songs that now prevail, while far higher in musical quality, offer human feeling itself in a purer, simpler, and doubtless nobler form; but the die-away period had its own fascination—the period when even the military bands marched to the plaintive strains of Mrs. Norton's ‘Love Not.’

In prose literature, as has been said, Bulwer and Disraeli best represented that epoch. The two fashionable novels, par excellence, of a whole generation, were ‘Pelham’ and ‘Vivian ’