[In the following essay, Bamborough traces the development of early Romantic river sonnets and credits Bowles with popularizing the form.]

Bowles's place in literary history is secure, if a little paradoxical. The publication of his sonnets in 1789 won him virtually immediate recognition, and for the next two decades his influence was widespread. His only serious rival as a sonneteer was Charlotte Smith, with whom his name was frequently coupled;¹ his sonnets are undoubtedly better than hers, but the fact that he is still to some degree recognized as a poet while she is not is probably more the result of the tributes paid to him by the first Romantics. Southey freely acknowledged his debt to Bowles, but better known than his references are Coleridge's account of how he was introduced to Bowle's Sonnets, written chiefly in Picturesque Spots by his friend Thomas Middleton, was immediately enthused and copied them out no fewer than forty times in order to give them to his friends, and the story of how John Wordsworth was kept waiting on Westminster Bridge while his brother devoured the Fourteen Sonnets.² It is true that the enthusiasm of both Wordsworth and Coleridge became in later years considerably tempered, but their early feelings were real enough and strong enough to earn Bowles a place in any account of their poetic development and in general to establish him as a ‘pre-Romantic’ or ‘proto-Romantic’ poet. Yet he survived all the Romantics except Wordsworth (who indeed only outlived him by a matter of days), and it is fair to say that the poetry he wrote as he grew older is certainly no more ‘Romantic’ than his early work, and often seems to belong more naturally even earlier in the eighteenth century than his sonnets. In 1789 he was a pioneer; by 1800—half a century before he died—he was outdated; as Coleridge notes in writing of him, ‘it is peculiar to original genius to become less striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and judgement of its contemporaries’.³

Bowles's other stock appearance in literary histories is as a protagonist in what is usually called the ‘Byron-Bowles controversy’, although many others were involved in the dispute, which went on for twenty years and finished only some years after Byron's death. Here the paradox, superficially at least, is to find Byron defending Pope against ‘harmonious Bowles’, ‘the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers’ as he is called in English Bards and Scots Reviewers (ll. 330-1). The ‘Byron-Bowles controversy’ was one skirmish in a prolonged battle about the proper subject and style for poetry which had been going on for at least the last half of the eighteenth century and which in some ways still continues today. In maintaining the superiority of the ‘natural’ over the ‘artificial’ in poetry—and thereby relegating Pope to a leading place among poets of the second order—Bowles was simply following the example of his master Joseph Warton, as in his poetry he followed chiefly Joseph's brother Thomas. Indeed he was the most fully-formed as well as the most talented of the Wartons' disciples and much the most important mediator of their influence.

In his “Monody on the death of Dr Warton” he pays eloquent tribute to the effect of Joseph Warton's encouragement and stimulus on him as a schoolboy:

The first inciting sounds of human praise,
          A parent's love excepted, came from thee;
And but for thee, perhaps, my boyish days
          Had all pass'd idly, and whate'er in me
Now live of hope, been buried.
                                                                                                                        I was one,
          Long bound by cold dejection's numbing chain,
          As in a torpid trance, that deemed it vain
To struggle; nor my eyelids to the sun
Uplifted: but I heard thy cheering voice!
          I shook my deadly slumber off;—I gaz'd
          Delighted 'round—awak'd, inspir'd, amaz'd,
I mark'd another world, and in my choice
Lovelier, and decked with light! …
                                                                                                                        'Twas thy first ray,
Sweet Fancy, on the heart—as when the day
Of Spring, along the melancholy tract
Of wintry Lapland, dawns; the cataract,
          From ice dissolving on the silent side
Of some white precipice, with paly gleam
Descends, while the cold hills a slanting beam
          Faint tinges: till, ascending in his pride,
The great Sun from the red horizon looks,
And wakes the tuneless birds, the stagnant brooks,
          And sleeping lakes!(4)

Subsequent lines express his gratitude to Warton for awakening in him a love of Nature, and of ancient and modern poetry, and also for arousing his moral sense and teaching him ‘with sober eyes / To look on life's severe realities' (ll. 117-18). Few headmasters have had more heart-felt thanks from their pupils.

From Winchester Bowles went to Trinity College, Oxford, apparently choosing Trinity rather than New College because Thomas Warton was its Senior Fellow. He can hardly have failed to know the younger of the Warton brothers at Winchester, where he spent much time in the vacations and mixed freely with the boys: Richard Mant records that

… during his residence at Winchester he was fond of associating with his brother's scholars: indeed he entered so heartily into their sports and employments, as to have been occasionally involved in rather ludicrous incidents. Being engaged with them in some culinary occupation, and alarmed by the sudden appearance of Dr Warton, he has been known to conceal himself in some dark corner, and has been drawn out from his hiding-place, to the no small astonishment of the Doctor, who had taken him for some great boy … ;⁵

an unusual predicament for a Camden Professor of History. Mant also notes that, although when Warton was in Oxford ‘he visited little’, he was nevertheless ‘much attached to Wykehamists, and had a speaking acquaintance with almost all, who came off from Winchester, and was forward in paying them attention when he met them in Trinity’.⁶

The reverence in which Warton was held by these young men is attested by Henry Kett's account of Henry Headley in his edition of Headley's Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry. Headley matriculated as a member of Trinity in 1782, a year later than Bowles, and Kett, who was a Fellow of Trinity himself, says:

His situation in the University was as favourable as he could desire: for it not only allowed him ample scope for the expansion of his genius, and the indulgence of his literary propensities, but presented him with a full view of that living example of classical taste and learned research, which he beheld with admiration, and followed with enthusiasm. This example was the Rev. Thomas Warton, well known to the Public by his numerous works: he was at that time senior Fellow of Trinity College, and usually resided there; and the situation of Headley, as a scholar of the same College, was favourable to the contemplation of Warton's character, general manners, and habits of life. As his friends found, that no subject was more agreeable to Headley, than anecdotes of Warton, they often fed his curiosity with a treat he so much enjoyed.⁷

Headley's first poems were published in 1785, when he was twenty; the Select Beauties—an anthology of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century verse, with some biographical notes—appeared two years later; he died of consumption when he was twenty-three. Bowles, with whom he had been on terms of intimacy, wrote a “Monody” on his death also, and in a note to it refers the ‘several young men of literary taste and talent’ who were their contemporaries at Trinity.⁸ Not all those he names were poets, but the list includes, besides Headley and Kett, William Benwell and George Richards. These, together with some others such as Thomas Russell, a contemporary of Bowles's at Winchester who matriculated at New College in 1780, form in a narrow sense ‘the school of Warton’, and are a group to which even now more attention might regardingly be paid.

The characteristics of the Wartons' poetry have often been catalogues—the love of Nature, particularly in its mildly melancholy aspects, the liking for the picturesque, the fondness for solitude, pensive contemplation and nostalgia, the deliberate echoes of Spenser, Shakespeare, and early Milton, and so on. The poems of the ‘school’ naturally have all these and add to them echoes of the Wartons themselves, and of Gray and Collins as well. A fair example is Russell's sonnet to Oxford, the third of those in his Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems, published posthumously in the same year as Bowles's first volume, and dedicated to Joseph Warton:

oxford, since late I left thy peaceful shore,
          Much I regret thy domes with turrets crown'd,
          Thy crested walls with twining ivy bound,
          Thy Gothic fanes, dim isles, and cloysters hoar,
And treasur'd rolls of Wisdom's ancient lore;
          Nor less thy varying bells, which hourly sound
          In pensive chime, or ring in lively round,
          Or toll in the slow Curfeu's solemn roar;
Much too thy moonlight walks, and musings grave
          Mid silent shades of high-embowering trees,
          And much thy Sister-streams, whose willows wave
In whispering cadence to the evening breeze;
          But most those Friends, who much-lov'd converse
                    gave
          The gentle Charms a tenfold power to please.

Russell, too, died young—in the same year, in fact, as Headley—and Bowles wrote of his ‘melancholy doom’ in his “Elegy, written at the Hotwells, Bristol”. He showed far more promise as a poet than Headley, however, and his sonnets were praised not only by Bowles, but by Southey, Coleridge, and Landor as well; Wordsworth not only commended him, but borrowed from him.⁹ With his sonnet to Oxford may be compared Bowles's “The River Cherwell”:

cherwell! how pleas'd along thy willowed edge
          Erewhile I strayed, or when the morn began
          To tinge the distant turret's gleamy fan,
Or Evening glimmered o'er the sighing sedge!
And now repos'd on thy lorn banks once more,
          I bid the Pipe farewell, and that sad lay
          Whose music on my melancholy way
I woo'd: amid thy waving willows hoar,
Seeking awhile to rest—till the bright sun
          Of joy returns; as when Heaven's beauteous bow
          Beams on the night-storm's passing wings below:
What'er betide, yet something have I won
Of solace, that may bear me on serene,
Till Eve's last hush shall close the silent scene.(10)

These two sonnets share the same gentle, relaxed movement and the note of quietly meditative nostalgia, and there are obvious verbal resemblances between them. The love of Oxford, and especially of its rivers, which both evince is common to all the writers of the school, and indeed more verses seem to have been written at this time than at any other celebrating those

          hallow'd Haunts! where Genius loves to stray,
Where silver isis winds her murm'ring way
Whence seen from far, aspiring to the skies,
The Awful Fanes of british athens rise,

as John Brand calls them.¹¹ Kett describes how Headley

On Cherwell's sedgy banks with Warton stray'd;
And woo'd the Muse in gothic stole array'd,(12)

and Headley himself produced an ‘Address to the River Isis’ which is very bad, but expresses a mood apparently shared by many of his friends, though sadly pertinent to his own brief life:

Since Isis thy stream as despairing I lie
          Thy muse-haunted marge with wild flowrets
                    intwin'd.
Make me grieve when I think that the moment draws nigh,
          When for ever, I fear, I must leave thee behind …
May the suns that I've seen, and the cloudless blue skies,
          The soft verdant meads, and rich woodlands around,
Still, still feed with rapture a thousand fond eyes,
          Though I be far distant,—or cold in the ground.(13)

Poems, and especially sonnets, addressed to rivers are common in the works of the ‘school’, the model being Thomas Warton's ‘To the River Lodon’:

Ah! what a weary race my feet have run,
          Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown'd,
          And thought my way was all through fairy ground,
          Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun,
Where first my muse to lisp her notes begun!
          While pensive memory traces back the round,
          Which fill the varied interval between:
          Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene.
Sweet native stream! those skies and suns so pure
No more return, to cheer my evening road!
          Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure,
Nor useless all my various days have flow'd,
          From youth's gay dawn to manhood's prime
                    mature;
          Nor with the Muse's laurel unbestow'd.

This was published in 1777, and it established almost a miniature genre of River Sonnets, parallel to the sonnets on Hope, to Sleep, on Contemplation and so on, which became increasingly common in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The extent to which Warton himself became identified with ‘river poetry’ may be attested by an elegy on his death, heavily and openly indebted to ‘Lycidas’, published in 1790 by one ‘Wartophilus’:

And oft, where Isis rolls his classic tide,
The River Gods, and Nymphs with willows crown'd,
Heaving their cozy head
From their coral-paven beds,
Charm'd by thy voice, would form a circle round
And list the magic of thy notes divine,
Their Patron thou …(14)

Examples of the genre are by no means confined to those who, like Bowles, had had close personal contact with Warton. The fourth edition of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets in 1786 contains no fewer than four sonnets addressed to or connected with the River Arun, although these are rather different in tone and are largely concerned with paying tribute to Otway, Collins and Hayley, all of whom had associations with that river. A ‘purer’ specimen is Edward Gardner's sonnet ‘On Revisiting the banks of the Avon near Bristol Hot Wells’:

Ah me! how oft with slow and ling'ring feet,
          Avon, I've trod thy grass-grown sedgy side,
And now once more thy verdant shore I greet,
          And view with raptur'd eye thy yellow tide.
Here my romantic morn of youth was spent,
          Here innocent I pass'd the listless day;
Hope ever springing blossom'd with content,
          While on thy flow'ry banks I pour'd the childish
                    lay.
O now again I hear thy murmurs flow,
          I see the alders o'er the low waves bend,
And sure these scenes must sweeter peace bestow,
          They seem the soothings of a much lov'd friend.
Farewell dear stream, as far from thee I go,
Perhaps from paths of peace to those of tearful woe.(15)

The debt to Warton, obvious enough here, is made explicit in Thomas Park's ‘To the River Witham’:

witham, along whose willow-crested shore,
          The idle stream, tho' sluggish, wanders wide
          Thro' reedy fens, where mournful bitterns hide,
          From Lindum's steep to Boston's lofty tow'r;
How oft, erewhile, in childhood's happy hour,
          Have I the angler's patient labour plied
          Along thy banks, or snar'd with boyish pride
          The wary pike, or grasp'd th'unwieldy oar,
Or plung'd beneath the wave. Yet memory now,
          E'en o'er these scenes of former joys can pine,
          Care with his rugged furrows marks my brow,
And past delights, like spectres, grimly shine:
          So did they erst round pensive Warton gleam,
          Warton, the laureat boast of Britain's Academe.(16)

A footnote to the final distich of this refers to its similarities to Warton's ‘Lodon’ sonnet.

As might be expected, however, it is Bowles who is the chief transmitter of the tradition. He wrote altogether five sonnets addressed to rivers, but of these three—“To the River Wainsbeck”, “The Rhine”, and “The Tweed Visited”—are more in the nature of topographical poems ‘written … in picturesque spots’, although they are given a personal, biographical note. Of the others, “The River Cherwell” has already been quoted; the last, “To the River Itchin”, is the closest of all to Warton:

itchin! when I behold thy banks again,
          Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
          On which the self-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart a shiv'ring sense of pain?
Is it, that many a summer's day has past
Since, in life's morn, I carolled on thy side?
Is it, that oft, since when, my heart has sigh'd,
          As youth, and Hope's delusive gleams, flew fast?
Is it that those who circled on thy shore,
Companions of my youth, now meet no more?
          Whate'er the cause, upon thy banks I bend
Sorrowing; yet feel such solace at my heart,
As at the meeting of some long-lost friend,
From whom, in happier hours, we wept to part.

It would be profitless to discuss how much the world-weariness of this is genuine and how much imitative, but it illustrates well enough what Coleridge called, in the sonnet he addressed to Bowles, the ‘mild and manliest melancholy’ of Bowles's poetry. The same judgement is expressed more fully (and more happily) in Biographia Literaria, where Coleridge speaks of the beneficial effect of falling under

the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets of Mr Bowles.¹⁷

Elsewhere he developed his view that sonnets ‘in which moral Sentiments, Affections and Feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature’, were conducive to a ‘habit of thought highly favourable to delicacy of character’, as creating ‘a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and material world’; in these respects, Coleridge said, Bowles's sonnets were superior to all others.¹⁸ That Coleridge overestimated Bowles is hardly in dispute; indeed, in Biographia Literaria he has to ask the reader to imagine the barrenness of the poetic language which surrounded him in his youth in order to understand his early enthusiasm. Yet Bowles was certainly not without merit. His sonnets are almost uniformly sad, but they are not, as Byron claimed, maudlin; his love of Nature seems genuine, whatever is owed to the tuition of his mentors; his diction, if it is often stilted and derivative, is capable of occasional flashes of naturalness and originality. The possibilities of the River Sonnet in the hand of a greater poet, however, are indicated, if only fitfully, in Coleridge's ‘To the River Otter’, the most obvious fruit of his admiration for Bowles:

Dear native Brook! wild Streamlet of the West!
          How many various-fated years have past.
          What happy and what mournful hours, since last
I skimm'd the smooth thin stone along thy breast,
Numbering its light leaps! yet so deep imprest
Sink the sweet scenes of childhood, that mine eyes
          I never shut amid the sunny ray,
But straight with all their tints thy waters rise,
          Thy crossing plank, thy marge with willows gray,
And bedded sand that vein'd with various dyes
Gleam'd thy bright transparence! On my way
          Visions of childhood! oft have ye beguil'd
Lone manhood's cares, yet waking fondest sighs
          Ah! that once more I were a careless child!(19)

Despite the banality of the ending, the details of skimming ‘the light thin stone’ and the ‘crossing plank’ lend this a touch of actuality not found in Bowles. A more conventional example of the type is Southey's ‘To a Brook near the Village of Corston’, published in his Poems of 1797, but dated ‘1794’:

As thus I bend me o'er thy bubbling stream
          And watch thy current, Memory's hand pourtrays
          The faint form'd scenes of the departed days,
Like the fair forest by the moon's pale beam
Dimly described but lovely. I have worn
          Upon thy banks the live-long hours away,
          When sportive Childhood wanton'd through the
                    day,
Joy'd at the opening splendour of the morn,
Or as the twilight darken'd, heaved the sigh
          Thinking of distant home, as down my cheek
          At the fond thought slow stealing on, would speak
The silent eloquence of the full eye,
Dim are the long past days, yet still they please
As the soft sounds half heard, borne on the inconstant breeze.

This justifies better than any of Bowles's sonnets the charge of sentimentality commonly levelled against the sonneteers, and explains also why Southey thought that he was the subject of Coleridge's parody in the first of the ‘Nehemiah Higginbotham’ sonnets.

It is in Wordsworth's poetry, however, that the tradition had its most remarkable flowering. His sonnet ‘There is a little unpretending Rill’ was perhaps composed in 1801 or 1802, although not published until 1820; another, ‘Brook! whose society the Poet seeks’, was written before 1804; both of these may perhaps have been stimulated by his admiration for Bowles. Superficially closer to the model is his ‘To the River Derwent’ (‘Among the mountains were we nursed, loved Stream’), but this is still more on the pattern of ‘sonnets written in picturesque places’ and was in fact, although it had previously been published in 1819, included in the Itinerary Poems of 1833, together with the more obviously topographical poems to the Greta and the Eden. (The composing of sonnets at picturesque spots, ruins, and so on is, of course, a commonplace in Wordsworth, and probably owes its origin to Bowles more than to anyone else.) Of greater importance is the sonnet ‘To the River Duddon’ (‘O mountain stream! the Shepherd and his Cot’), which appeared first in the Poems of 1807. This subsequently became the fourteenth of the River Duddon sequence, of which it was, according to Wordsworth, the first to be written. It must, therefore, also date from the early 1800s or before, because sonnet xxvi of the series is a version of a poem which was transcribed for Coleridge before March 1804. The manuscript version of this runs:

Dear Native Brooks your ways I have pursu'd
How fondly, whether ye delight in screen
Of shady trees to rest yourselves unseen
Or from your lofty dwellings scarcely view'd
But by the mountain eagle, your bold brood
Pure as the morning, angry, boisterous, keen,
Green as sea water, foaming white and green
Comes roaring like a joyous multitude,
Nor have I been your follower in vain,
For not to speak of life and its first joys,
Bound to your goings by a slender chain
Of flowers and delicate dreams that entertain
Loose minds when men are growing out of Boys
My manly heart has owed to your rough noise
Triumph and thought no bondage can restrain.(20)

The resemblance of the first line of this to the opening of Coleridge's ‘Otter’ sonnet is close, and might even suggest that the two poems were composed in direct rivalry. It has all the general characteristics of the type, including the disregard of the strict sonnet form and the loose rhyme-scheme, and its sentiments are those familiar from earlier examples, but Wordsworth has abandoned the purely nostalgic longing for childhood innocence common to Coleridge's and Southey's sonnets, substituting a tribute to the effect of Nature in forming the moral character. This is not only more what was expected from him; it is actually closer to Bowles himself, especially in his “Cherwell” sonnet. The admirers of Bowles's poetry appear to have had a tendency to sentimentalize it, dwelling too much on its powers of ‘stealing from Pity's eye the ready tear’,²¹ and of this both Coleridge and Southey seem to have been guilty. Throughout Bowles's work, in fact, there runs an emphasis on the power of Nature not simply to sympathize with man's sorrows and to comfort, but to strengthen fortitude and Christian hope, and this is a note to which Wordsworth could very easily respond.

It would be absurd to suppose that without Bowles's example Wordsworth would never have felt the inspiration which the sight and sound of rushing waters so often and rewardingly gave him, or would never have recognized the importance in his own life of the sound of his native Derwent as it made

                                        ceasless music through the night and day
Which with its steady cadence, tempering
Our human waywardness, compos'd my thoughts
To more than infant softness, giving me,
Among the fretful dwellings of mankind,
A foretaste, a dim earnest of the calm,
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.(22)

Yet it is surely not over-straining the evidence to suppose that his early enthusiasm for Bowles both sprang at least in part from their common feeling for rivers and also conditioned to some extent Wordsworth's early expression of this feeling. Again, no one would deny the supreme importance to Wordsworth of hearing Dorothy read Milton's sonnets in May 1802, but this experience did not, as is sometimes suggested, totally eclipse his admiration for contemporary sonneteers. When the immediate impulse from hearing them read had worn off, as it certainly had by the time of the composition of the River Duddon sonnets, his earlier loyalties to some extent seem to have reasserted themselves;²³ there are faint echoes of Bowles and Warton scattered about the sequence, outside the fourteenth and twenty-sixth sonnets, the earliest to be composed. The most interesting speculation, however, is exactly how early these sonnets were written. We know that it was before 1804; it may have been considerably earlier, at the time when the influence of Bowles was at its strongest, and when Coleridge was both composing his sonnet to the Otter, and also (as Wordsworth only apparently remembered after he had written his own sequence) meditating a discursive, reflective poem to be modelled on the course of a river, and to be called ‘The Brook’.²⁴ Certainly neither Warton nor Bowles could ever have written the last and most Wordsworthian of the River Duddon sonnets, but it may not be too much to claim the sequence as the last product of the tradition inaugurated by Warton and popularized by Bowles.

Notes

1. When the second edition of his sonnets was published in 1789, Bowles felt it necessary to deny that he had initiated the work of ‘Mrs Smyth’, which, he says, was not published until after his own sonnets were written. Since Charlotte Smith's sonnets were first published in 1784, this has some bearing on the dating of Bowles's poems: see below, n. 10.

2. For Southey, see the Preface to The Poetical Works of Robert Southey, collected by himself (London, 1837), I. vii-ix, and cf. his letter to Bowles of 19 March 1825 (in G. Greever, A Wiltshire Parson and his friends (London, 1926), p. 44). Coleridge's account is in Biographia Literaria (ed. J. Shawcross (Oxford, 1907), i. 8). The fact that Coleridge refers to a ‘pamphlet’ containing 20 sonnets makes it likely that he saw the second edition—sonnets, written chiefly at picturesque spots, during a Tour, which actually contains 21 sonnets—rather than the first edition, Fourteen Sonnets, Elegiac and Descriptive, of which only 100 copies were printed. Wordsworth, however, refers specifically to the Fourteen Sonnets (see M. Moorman, William Wordsworth, the Early Years (Oxford, 1957), i. 125).

3. Biographia Literaria, ed. cit., i. 15.

4. Poems, by the Reverend Wm. Lisle Bowles (London and Bath, 1801), ii. 138 (ll. 19-32, 36-46).

5. The Poetical Works of the late Thomas Warton, B.D. (5th edn, Oxford, 1802), p. civ.

6. Ibid., p. c.

7. Select Beauties of Ancient English Poetry, with remarks by the late Henry Headley, A.B., and a biographical sketch by the Rev. Henry Kett, B.D. (London, 1810), pp. iv-v. The Gentleman's Magazine for February 1791 contains an ‘Elegy on a Much Respected and Revered Friend’, signed ‘Philisides’, which begins, inevitably

                                                     Isis, thy dancing waves, of late so bright,
                                                     Now black'ning stagnate—Warton is no more!

   and go on to give a touching picture of him:

                                                     No more, observant of each budding shoot
                                                     Of youthful fancy, shall his countenance cheer
                                                     Its blushing progress. To each nurtur'd root
                                                     Of genius, that benign regard how dear!

                                                     So meek, it bent indulgent ev'n to me;
                                                     All Wykeham's sons confess'd its genial tone,
                                                     O Warton! if in heart I bear not thee,
                                                     Its pulse, its feeling's lost, and vital course.

                                                     How brisk it bounded, when he, smiling, laid
                                                     Light on my auburn curls his plaintive hand!
                                                     ‘There is some spirit in these lines,’ he said,
                                                     ‘That's not ill turn'd, this not inaptly scann'd …’

   (Gent. Mag. lxi. 165; ll. 24-37)

8. Poetical Works, ed. G. Gilfillan (Edinburgh, 1855), i. 37 n. The Monody was first published in The Gentleman's Magazine for December 1788.

9. The last four lines of Wordsworth's sonnet ‘Iona (Upon Landing)’ are quoted from sonnet x of Russell's Sonnets and Miscellaneous Poems.

10. This is the only one of Bowles's ‘River’ sonnets not in the first edition; it appeared first in the second, and may have been written later than the others. (The dating of Bowles's early verse is rather uncertain, but he claimed that most of the sonnets had been written three years before their publication, and some may have been written even earlier than that.)

11. On Illicit Love. Written among the Ruins of Godstow Nunnery near Oxford (Newcastle, 1775), ll. 5-8. Brand, who had been a member of Lincoln, goes on to lament that he himself is

                                                      Doom'd on thy banks, commercial tyne to roam,
                                                      Where lev'lling phrenzy finds her fav'rite home.

12. ‘Elegy on the death of Mr Headley’, ll. 33-4 (first printed in Gent. Mag. for January 1789).

13. Select Beauties, ed. cit., ii. 207 (ll. 1-4, 13-16).

14. Gent. Mag. lx. 648 (July 1790).

15. Miscellanies in Prose and Verse (Bristol, 1798), ii. 127; see R. D. Havens, ‘More eighteenth-century sonnets’, M. L. N. xlv (1930), 77-84.

16. Sonnets and other small poems (London, 1797), pp. 25, 116.

17. Biographia Literaria, ed. cit., i. 10.

18. See the Introduction to his Selection of Sonnets of 1796, which includes three sonnets by Bowles (Complete Poetical Works, ed. E. H. Coleridge (Oxford, 1912), ii. 1139).

19. This was first printed complete in the Selection of Sonnets but was perhaps written c. 1793; see Complete Poetical Works, ed. cit., i. 48. The connection between this sonnet, Bowles and Warton was noted by Professor R. D. Havens, in The Influence of Milton on English Poetry (New York, 1961), p. 513.

20. Wordsworth, Poetic Works, ed. E. de Selincourt and H. Darbishire (Oxford, 1940-9), iii. 523-4.

21. ‘Sonnet. By Miss Locke. Addressed to the Rev. W. L. Bowles’, Gent. Mag. lxiii. 357 (April 1793), l. 4.

22. Prelude (1806), i. 279-85.

23. See his letter to A. Dyce of May 10, 1830 (Letters of William and Dorothy Wordsworth. The Later Years, ed. E. de Selincourt (Oxford, 1939), i. 478).

24. See Wordsworth's Poetic Works, ed. cit., iii. 803-4, and Biographia Literaria, ed. cit., i. 128-9.