SOURCE: “Coleridge and a Poets' Poet: William Lisle Bowles,” in English Miscellany, Vol. 14, 1963, pp 95-114.

[In the following essay, Doughty explores Bowles's influence on three young Romantic poets: Southey, Wordsworth, and Coleridge.]

Such verse as Bowles, heart-honoured poet sang,
That wakes the tear yet steals away the pang,

Coleridge

Amongst the various publications of the year 1789, in England, there appeared a small anonymous volume, a mere pamphlet indeed, issued at Bath, and entitled Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Journey, 1789. The author, William Lisle Bowles, was a clergyman with means and leisure, a graduate of Trinity College, Oxford, and now 27 years of age. Bowles could never have expected the immediate popularity his little book gained, so unpretentious in form and content. Nor was its popularity short-lived. A second edition appeared before the close of the year, seven editions before the end of the century, and a continuous demand followed until the beginning of the Victorian Age. From time to time, Bowles not only added more sonnets to his original fourteen, but also made alternations to the text.

It was not, however, this general popularity which has preserved for Bowles his niche in the hall of poetic fame, but the fact that his book excited the enthusiasm of the three leading poets of the age, while still but youths of poetic ambitions, their tastes still uncertain and unformed. Coleridge, then a youth of 17, at Christ's Hospital, was given a copy by a friend in October 1789, and in his enthusiasm made forty copies himself in the next eighteen months, to give to all who might, like himself, become Bowles's idolators. Wordsworth, discovering the sonnets while in London, in 1793, sat down, enraptured, on the nearest convenient seat, a recess in Westminster Bridge, and read the book through, while his brother Christopher vainly tried to move him. On both poets, Bowles had considerable influence. On the third, and least important, Southey, who preferred long epics to sonnets, his influence was less, but even Southey wrote to a friend in 1795, « my poetical taste was much meliorated by Bowles ».

Bowles's sonnets encouraged the young Wordsworth in his tendency towards retrospective moods associated with memories of beautiful places, the adoption of the personal and particular in place of the typical and general. But upon Coleridge their impact was overwhelming. Not yet acquainted with Cowper, he found Bowles the first poet « who combined natural thoughts with natural diction, the first who reconciled the heart with the head ». From too early and bewildered wanderings in metaphysics and theology, he asserted, he was « auspiciously withdrawn … by 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 and other early poems of Mr. Bowles ». His appreciation was doubtless the greater, because he was now beginning to harbour tender feelings towards a lady himself, and was quite ready to welcome sentiment, even sentimentality.

It was not as most critics assert, that Coleridge learned from these sonnets of new, hitherto unsuspected possibilities in poetry. He was not at all like Keats on first reading Chapman's Homer, feeling

                              like some watcher of the skies,
When a new planet swims into his ken.

What fascinated the uncertain and bewildered youth of 17 was to find poetry that seemed to be his own not yet written poems, poetry that expressed himself, reflected himself. And that this was the work of a contemporary, made its appeal to him yet more intimate, its stimulus to his own hope of becoming a poet still greater. For, as he wrote (of Bowles and himself) in the Biographia Literaria, impersonally, « the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood ».

There, above everything, lies the essential explanation of Bowles's appeal to Coleridge. They had lived in the same period, (Bowles's ten years seniority made little difference with so precocious a youth as Coleridge), had been largely moulded by the same prevailing cultural—emotional and aesthetic—currents of their day. And these, in poetry were the characteristics of the « Churchyard School » of Gray's imitators, poets of grave and sombre moralizing over human life, of introspection and retrospection, a dwelling upon the lost joys, real or imagined of childhood, upon the disappointments of age, and similar themes. And with this « Churchyard » current there mingled a more recent but powerful one, that of the « Gothic » school with its tales of terror largely associated with old castles, monasteries, and with monuments of antiquity in general.

With these mingled another, also more modern than the « Churchyard » devotees, the cult of the immensely fashionable « picturesque », which was covering the country with devout followers searching for « picturesque » spots and the presumably « picturesque » feelings they were to excite. « The Picturesque », which posed awkward but fascinating questions for its adherents, because Burke in his essay On The Sublime and Beautiful, in the middle of the century, had said that the beautiful must be « smooth ». What then could the beauty of a storm be, and kindred « rough » objects, like mountains, all of which now seemed beautiful? They must be « picturesque », and the question was satisfactorily settled thus. A lake was beautiful on a fine day, and only « picturesque » on a stormy one. So the wit, Sidney Smith, said he now understood the picturesque, « the vicar's horse is beautiful, the curate's pony, picturesque! ».

Nor were these all. In addition there was the widespread « Sentimental Movement », stemming from Richardson and Sterne, and permeating all the other contemporary influences.

Such was the aesthetic environment of both Bowles and Coleridge; and even before Bowles « swam into his ken », Coleridge anticipated Bowles by a year,—if we may trust the given date for both composition and text,—when he wrote his “Sonnet to the Autumnal Moon”, with most of these elements present in some degree; for the picturesque inevitably brought in « Nature » as well as old castles and similar works of man. It is not enough therefore to say, as one critic has done, of Coleridge, « He fell in with the sonnets of Bowles, and the passion for natural beauty that slumbered in him was strong enough to be evoked by that mild stimulus. Bowles, in his generous phrase made him a poet. ».

If from a consideration of these general cultural influences acting upon both poets we turn to particular elements in Bowles, and their fascination for Coleridge, one of the most important is their romantic quality of the personal note. And in these sonnets this personal note is peculiarly one of the unison between aspects of nature and the human spirit, the thought and emotion of man. Bowles, as another critic says, tries « to paint directly what the eye sees, not the generalized and academic view of the type-scene by the type-poet, which had been the fashion for so long », and also attempts « to connect this vision with personal experience, passion or meditation ».

Bowles was by no means the first 18th century poet to include some of his characteristics in the sonnet; many writers had in greater or less degree approached his manner of employing it. Even in the very heart of the Augustan period, the elder Warton had written a so-called sonnet on a public monument, Windsor Castle, a beautiful, unconscious example of the emerging romantic spirit still dressed in the poetic robe of Pope. And twelve years before Bowles, Warton's son Thomas had written similar sonnets, often more obviously touched with the rising romantic spirit, as when he turns from historic monuments, Stonehenge or Wilton House, to natural objects, to the view at Winslade, or the River Lodon. Only five years before Bowles's sonnets appeared, the lachrymose and intensely personal sonnets of Charlotte Smith, closely associated with the moods of Nature, had appeared and been warmly welcomed in many editions while in the very year of Bowles's, 1789, a more considerable poet than Charlotte Smith, but a variable one, Thomas Russell, Fellow of New College, had won popular praise, including that of Southey, (probably still unaware of Bowles), who declared him to be « the best English sonnet-writer ».

But none had assimilated the new romantic spirit in some of its manifestations so well as Bowles. These others were « professional poets », « bards », with exhortations to all sorts of irresponsive things, villages, rivers, Stonehenge and the moon, etc. Bowles, it is true, systematically apostrophizes the subjects of his sonnets, however inanimate they may be, but he avoids the conventional and wearisome « Hail » and similar pomposities, so often found in others. His most admirable quality is his naturalness; these poems are, to adopt Dr. Johnson's excellent phrase approving Hamlet's ghost, « level with life ». As one critic has said, « He had no poetic force, but he had the elements of poetic rightness; a genuine and gentle strain of humanity, that of the cultured rural clergyman; and an instinct for seeking humble-minded solitude in the midst of natural things as a solace in trouble. Above all, he had a suitable diction, in faint relief, but generally pure and adequate ».

Describing the raison d'être of his sonnets, Bowles explained in his Preface to the sixth edition, in 1798: « They can be considered in no other light, than as exhibiting occasional reflections which naturally arose in his mind, chiefly during various excursions, undertaken to relieve, at the time, depression of spirits. They were therefore, in general, suggested by the scenes before him—and wheresoever such scenes appeared to harmonize with his disposition at the moment, the sentiments were involuntarily prompted ». The depression of spirits, he also tells us, was due « to the sudden death of a deserving young woman ». And we learn, indirectly, through the poems, that the lady was one to whom he was engaged and about to marry. Bowles also tells us that his father, also a clergyman, was, like his son, very fond of landscape, and that from his mother he inherited a love of music, particularly delighting in the sound of bells. Indeed, when the poet Tom Moore visited him in his parsonage, he reported: « his sheepbells are tuned in thirds and fifths, but he is an excellent fellow notwithstanding ».

One of the best of Bowles's sonnets, yet at the same time quite representative, is that on Time:

O Time! who know'st a lenient hand to lay
Softest on Sorrow's wounds, and slowly thence
(Lulling to sad repose the weary sense)
The faint pang stealest unperceived away;
On thee I rest my only hope at last,
And think, when thou hast dried the bitter tear
That flows in vain o'er all my soul held dear,
I may look back on many a sorrow past,
And meet life's peaceful evening with a smile—
As some lone bird, at day's departing hour,
Sings in the sunbeam of the transient shower,
Forgetful, tho' its wings are wet the while:—
Yet ah! how much must that poor heart endure,
Which hopes from thee, and thee alone, a cure!

What attracted the new, youthful romantic poets in such sonnets as these was their gentle but insistent « poeticality ». Simplicity of feeling and of language. Such poetry had an intimacy not found in the « big bow-wow » style of the Augustan Bards. Gray of couse had been the primary inspiration of Bowles, as of many others of the later eighteenth century. In essence he had done it long before and he had done it better. But still the Augustan singing robes clung to Gray, even in his churchyard, and he was also a Cambridge don, so that even his simple villagers in their country churchyard must be associated with « Ambition », « Grandeur » and many other grandiose epithets, besides the possibility of having had « hearts once pregnant with celestial fire », such, of course, as one might imagine possessed by « Swains ». That poeticality was on its way out when Bowles appeared, and what of Gray he preserved was the new poeticality, the quiet, pensive, reverie, personal and private; this poetry was not to be heard, it was overheard. The poet was communing with himself, in his own natural voice and speech; the undertone of a man suffering from « depression of spirits ». And permeating his poems was above all the impress of a sensitive soul, sentiment,—sometimes, as his enemies quickly and satirically demonstrated, sentimentality.

Even Bowles is not entirely free from personifications of abstract virtues, but when he does use them, they are generally used as Collins uses them, so much like living beings in action, that they almost become physical realities. It is thus in the sonnet “Written at Bamborough Castle”:

And Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
Of midnight when the moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower,
And turns her ear to each expiring cry;
Blest if her aid some fainting wretch might save,
And snatch him cold and sleepless from the wave.

There is indeed in Bowles a faint anticipation of the lone and wandering spirit of Childe Harold. The poet in these sonnets is, like Byron in little, a solitary wanderer, roaming companionless about the remote ways of the world, communing with himself, dreaming of the past, with no hold upon existence save his sorrowful sympathy with Nature.

And many a softened image of the past
Pleased I combine, and bid remembrance keep,
To soothe me with fair views and fancies rude
When I pursue my path in solitude,

he writes on leaving a village in Scotland. Thus he goes on his way, brooding over such experiences as the delusions of Hope, the tender memories of childhood, the sense of loss that comes with passing days, the great solace of Nature's beauty:

There is strange music in the stirring wind,
When lowers the autumnal eve, and all alone
To the dark wood's cold covert thou art gone,
Whose ancient trees on the rough slopes reclined
Rock, and at times scatter their tresses sear.

The peace and quiet charm of Oxford in his day inevitably inspired some sonnets. One, reminds us of his special affection for the music of bells, as also at Ostend, in another poem.

I never hear the sound of thy glad bells,
Oxford; and chime harmonious, but I say,
(Sighing to think how time has worn away)
Some spirit speaks in the sweet tone that swells,
Heard after years of absence, from the vale
Where Cherwell winds.

Rivers were becoming by this time a recognized property of the sonneteers, and in another sonnet Bowles expresses the joy one had often given him:

Cherwell! how pleased along thy willowed hedge
Erewhile I strayed, or when the morn began
To tinge the distant turret's gleamy fan,
Or evening glimmered o'er the sighing sedge!

“Dover Cliffs” despite their contrast with the Cherwell as inspiration, produce only the same plaintive regrets for life's fatal inadequacies and frustrations. The sonnet was written on July 20, 1787.

On these white cliffs that calm above the flood
Uplift their shadowing heads, and, at their feet,
Scarce hear the surge that has for ages beat,
Sure many a lonely wanderer has stood;
And, whilst the lifted murmur met his ear,
And o'er the distant billows the still Eve
Sailed slow, has thought of all his heart must leave
To-morrow,—of the friends he loved most dear,—
Of social scenes, from which he wept to part:—
But if, like me, he knew how fruitless all
The thoughts that would full fain the past recall,
Soon would he quell the risings of his heart,
And brave the wild winds and unhearing tide,
The World his country, and his God his guide.

No matter what the supposed source of inspiration, the thoughts which weave the sestets of Bowles's sonnets dwell always on the same cluster of obsessive themes. Such is his sonnet “At Ostend,” written two days after the preceding one.

How sweet the tuneful bells' responsive peal!
As when at opening morn, the fragrant breeze
Breathes on the trembling sense of wan disease,
So piercing to my heart their force I feel!
And hark! with lessening cadence now they fall,
And now, along the white and level tide,
They fling their melancholy music wide;
Bidding me many a tender thought recall
Of summer days, and those delightful years
When by my native streams, in life's fair prime,
The mournful magic of their mingling chime
First waked my wondering childhood into tears!
But seeming now, when all those days are o'er,
The sounds of joy, once heard, and heard no more.

One other sonnet, also of Bowles's best known, and, like that to the Cherwell, to a river, this time the Itchin, is sufficient to show Bowles's monotonous repetition of the same thoughts and feelings:

Itchin, when I behold thy banks again,
Thy crumbling margin, and thy silver breast,
On which the selfe-same tints still seem to rest,
Why feels my heart the shivering sense of pain?
Is it, that many a summer's day has passed
Since, in life's morn, I carolled on thy side?
Is it, that oft, since then, my heart has sighed
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.

A comparison of this sonnet with Coleridge's « Sonnet to the River Otter », clearly reveals the influence of Bowles upon him; so too does a comparison of Bowles's “Sonnet on Leaving Winchester,” (his school), with Coleridge's « Sonnet on Quitting School for College », and, although not in the sonnet form, Coleridge's « Absence, a Farewell Ode on Quitting School for Jesus College Cambridge ».

On December 26th, 1794, Coleridge made a public declaration of his admiration for Bowles by publishing in the Morning Chronicle a sonnet to him, in which even more clearly than in his Biographia Literaria twenty years later, he describes his indebtedness to the poet.

My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains,
That, on the still air floating, tremblingly
Waked in me Fancy, Love, and Sympathy!
For hence, not callous to a brother's pains
Thro' Youth's gay prime and thornless paths I went;
And, when the darker day of life began,
And I did roam, a thought-bewildered man!
Thy kindred lays an healing solace lent,
Each lonely pang with dreamy joys combined,
And stole from vain Regret her scorpion stings;
While shadowy Pleasure with mysterious wings,
Brooded the wavy and tumultuous mind,
Like that great Spirit, who with plastic sweep
Moved on the darkness of the formless Deep.

In a second better sonnet, published in 1796 and closely similar in general to the first, Coleridge supplemented, in the first tercet, his earlier sonnet, by stressing the sensuous element in Bowles's appeal:

My heart has thanked thee, Bowles! for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
Of wild-bees in the sunny showers of spring!

What this (sometimes) over-sweetness of Bowles meant to Coleridge, appears in Lamb's description of him then, in the London public-house, The Salutation and Cat, « when you were repeating one of Bowles's sweetest sonnets, in your sweet manner, while we two were indulging sympathy, a solitary luxury, by the fireside at the Salutation ». As one of Coleridge's critics says, « dream and melody were not momentary accesses, but the elementary habit and virtue of his mind ».

Nor was Bowles's influence upon Coleridge limited to poetry. In defending Bowles, Coleridge, while still but a youth, was forced into the path of individual criticism of a contemporary, a critical attitude depending primarily upon his personal response to the poetry, without external guidance of importance from formal critical principles, despite his too great readiness in the Biographia to give credit to his classical training at school which in fact tended in an opposite direction. But also in the Biographia he quite clearly and correctly indicated the manner of Bowles's influence upon his critical faculty: « The controversies occasioned by my unfeigned zeal for the honour of a favourite contemporary, then known to me only by his works, were of great advantage in the formation and establishment of my taste and critical opinions … According to the faculty or source, from which the pleasure given by any poem or passage was derived, I estimated the merit of such poem or passage. … Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous undercurrent of feeling! It is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement ».

Coleridge's enthusiasm for Bowles was no mere transitory infatuation. The time came later when he regarded the poet more critically, but that was not until the new century dawned, nor did he ever renounce this « bard of my idolatry ». Meanwhile his devotion found continual expression in his letters. Early in 1792, he sends Mary Evans, (the object of his first, and unsuccessful love), « some delicious poetry lately published by the exquisite Bowles », and a few days later, points out to her, apologetically, « beauties which would be obvious to a far less sensible heart than yours ».

Two years later, however, he is shocked by textual alterations: « I sent for Bowles's Works while at Oxford. How was I shocked. Every omission and every alteration disgusts Taste and mangles Sensibility. Surely some Oxford Toad [Coleridge disliked Oxford] has been squatting at the poet's ear, and spitting into it the cold venom of Dullness ». But, he continues: « It is not Bowles. He is still the same (the added poems prove it) descriptive, dignified, tender, sublime. The sonnets added are exquisite ». Six months later he tells Southey: « Your poems and Bowles are my only morning companions ». Within a week, however, he is roused by some remarks of the actor and author Thomas Holcroft, who, says Coleridge, not only « absolutely infests you with Atheism », but even « thinks lightly or rather contemptuously of Bowles's sonnets—the language flat and prosaic and inharmonious,—and the sentiments fit only for girls!—Come—come—Mr Holcroft, as much unintelligible metaphysics and as much bad criticism as you please—but no Blasphemy against the divinity of a Bowles! ».

Visiting Matlock in August 1796, he does not forget that he is in « the place monodized by Bowles », and three months later, having some spare paper, he « amuses himself » by printing a sixpenny pamphlet¹ of 28 sonnets by contemporaries including 3 by Bowles and 4 by himself. « The essay, which I have written at the beginning, I like ». It was largely incorporated in the introductory essay on the sonnet in his Poems, 1797, in which he praised Bowles for « moral sentiments, affections or feelings, deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature ». At first, to Lamb's delight, he contemplated dedicating the volume to Bowles, but later changed his mind and chose his brother George, instead.

Soon Coleridge received another shock. « Bowles, (the bard of my idolatry) », he tells his friend Thelwall, in November 1796, « has written a poem lately without plan or meaning—but the component parts are divine ». « Exquisite » the last line:

And almost faints with joy amidst the broad day-light

« The last line is indeed exquisite ». The poem, Hope, deserved everything bad, in fact, that could be said about it. But when John Thelwall, objected to « exquisite », Coleridge leapt to its defence: « As to Bowles, I affirm that the manner of his accentuation in the words broad day-light (three long syllables) is a beauty, as it admirably expresses the Captive's dwelling on the sight of noon—with rapture and a kind of wonder … But that Bowles, the most tender, and, with the exception of Burns the only always-natural poet in our language, that he should not escape the charge of Della Cruscanism, this cuts the skin and surface of my heart. ‘Poetry to have its highest relish must be impassioned!’ [quoting Thelwall] True! but first, Poetry ought not always to have its highest relish, and secondly, … Poetry, though treating on lofty and abstract truths, ought to be deemed impassioned by him who reads it with impassioned feelings ». To drive the points home, he at the same time sent Mrs Thelwall a copy of Bowles's 4th edition, with an inscription beginning: « I entreat your acceptance of this volume, which has given me more pleasure, and done my heart more good, than all the other books I ever read, excepting my Bible … ».

So far, Coleridge had no personal acquaintance with the poet. When Thelwall naturally assumed such acquaintance, Coleridge replied on the last day of 1796, « You imagine that I know Bowles personally. I never saw him but once; and when I was a boy, and in Salisbury market-place ». The following year, shortly after Bowles had married, the two poets met, when on September 6th, 1797, Coleridge set off with his tragedy Osorio, to read it to him, and to ask for his criticisms². According to Coleridge's publisher and friend, some disillusion, as one might expect, was the result.

Whether it was the personal disillusion of their meeting, or disillusion, as it might well be with Bowles's later inspirations—Verses to John Howard (1789), Coombe Ellen (1798), St Michael's Mount (1798), The Battle of the Nile (1799), The Sorrows of Switzerland (1801)—, by 1802 Coleridge's enthusiasm was on the wane. To a friend in July 1802, he trounced, rightly, the « vile, commonplace trashy style » of a couplet of verse translation by Bowles; apostrophizing a river:

Oh thou, that prattling on thy pebbled way
Through my paternal vale dost stray …

« Bowles's execrable translation » he calls it, but adds the excuse: « I am confident that Bowles good-naturedly translated it in a hurry, merely to give him an excuse for printing the admirable original ».

Perhaps it was a sting of conscience that made Coleridge a fortnight later tell Southey of a plan to bring out a new selection of contemporary poetry, including Bowles, with a companion volume of essays. Southey, rightly, knowing from experience that it would never appear, replied, caustically: « You spawn plans like a herring; I only wish as many of the seed were to vivify in proportion ». But a month afterwards, Coleridge's doubts about Bowles's influence emerge in a letter to his friend William Sotheby, a minor poet of the day. Recalling a remark of Southey's made some years before, Coleridge writes: « Southey observed to me, that you, I, and himself had all done ourselves harm by suffering our admiration of Bowles to bubble up too often on the surface of our poems ». And Coleridge goes on to say that he has recognized a line in Bowles as from one of his own poems, which reminds him of « the pride and joy » he would have had at the time of writing his poem, had he known it would be imitated by Bowles. But notably « the pride and joy » are now in the conditional past. At some later time, he added a note to his own poem, Melancholy: « Bowles borrowed these lines unconsciously, I doubt not. I had repeated the poem on my first visit ».

For long, a more detached critical attitude to Bowles had evidently and with intermittent regrets, been maturing in Coleridge. On September 10th, 1802, just a fortnight after his letter to Sotheby, he gives the same friend, in an admirable passage of acute analysis, the evident result of his further investigation of his doubts of Bowles raised in his preceding letter. « Bowles's stanzas on Navigation », he writes, « are among the best in that second volume. But the whole volume is woefully inferior to its predecessor. There reigns through all the blank verse poems such a perpetual trick of moralizing every thing—which is very well occasionally—but never to see or describe any interesting appearance in nature, without connecting it by dim analogies with the moral world, proves faintness of impression. Nature has her proper interest; and he will know what it is, who believes and feels, that everything has a life of its own, and that we are all one Life. A poet's heart and intellect should be combined, intimately combined and unified, with the great appearances in Nature—and not merely held in solution and loose mixture with them, in the shape of formal similies. I do not mean to exclude these formal similies, there are moods of mind, in which they are natural—pleasing moods of mind, and such as a poet will often have, and sometimes express; but they are not his highest, and most appropriate moods. They are ‘Sermoni propriora’ which I once translated ‘Properer for a sermon’. The truth is—Bowles has indeed the sensibility of a poet; but he has not the passion of a great poet. His latter writings all want native passion. Milton here and there supplies him with an appearance of it; but he has no native passion because he is not a Thinker … » Coleridge, at anyrate, was now evidently coming into his own as a critic, and with the unsuspecting help of Bowles! His claim in the Biographia that this was so, was evidently well founded.

Coleridge's changed views however were not solely due to his maturing critical power, for since the original sonnets, there had been a marked decline in the rest of Bowles's poetry, and of course in Bowles himself. The young, unknown, wandering, heart-stricken poet of the early sonnets was now, in 1802, a married, prosperous, famous parson and bard of forty, regularly producing uninspired works at short intervals. From 1804 to his death in 1850, the same year as that of Wordsworth, he was vicar of Bremhill, in Wiltshire, living in a parsonage which Coleridge found « a perfect Paradise of a place ».

Although now middle-aged and established in life, Bowles was destined to become once more a centre of general literary interest, but one far removed from that of the early sonnets. In 1806, he edited Pope's poetry, which as one would expect, did not appeal to him, as he clearly showed. Immediately champions of Pope appeared against Bowles, especially Byron, and also Campbell then a popular poet of the day. But the Bowles who met their challenge was by no means the quiet, sentimental, lachrymose individual of his early work, and did not hesitate to affirm his convictions.

Bowles, of course, stood for « nature » against the formal « art » of Pope. « The passions of nature », he maintained, « not morals, or manners of life, constitute the eternal basis of what is sublime or beautiful in poetry », and « there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings in poetry ».

Coleridge was not directly engaged in the controversy, but his very few critical references to Pope in his letters show, as we should expect, that his sympathy is with Bowles. Thus in November, 1799, long before the Bowles fracas, he tells Southey of « a poem in couplets, didactic or satirical—such a one as the lovers of genuine poetry would call sensible and entertaining, such as the Ignoramuses and Pope-admirers would deem genuine poetry ». When ten years after the battle about Pope, Coleridge in the Biographia, touched on the question, but in relation to the early influence of Bowles, he maintained the same attitude but with even greater understanding of both sides of the question. Bowles, he said, had saved him in youth from being drawn into the crowd of Pope's admirers. « I was not blind to the merits of this school », he wrote, « yet as from inexperience of the world, and consequent want of sympathy with the general subjects of these poems, they gave me little pleasure, I doubtless undervalued the kind, and with the presumption of youth witheld from its masters the legitimate name of poets. I saw that the excellence of this kind consisted in just and acute observations on men and manners in an artificial state of society, as its matter and substance; and in the logic of wit, conveyed in strong epigrammatic couplets, as its form … the matter and diction seemed to me characterized not so much by poetic thoughts, as by thoughts translated into the language of poetry ».

By this time, Bowles was a prebendary of Salisbury Cathedral. In 1818 he became Chaplain to the Prince Regent, and ten years later, a canon residentiary at Salisbury.

Coleridge, who in the sphere of mundane reality preferred prosperous persons who could in various ways be useful to him, cultivated Bowles in later years, when, living at Calne, he was only two miles from the Paradisal vicarage. Besides sometimes staying there as Bowles's guest, he became at times a member of his congregation. A somewhat alarming member he must have been to Bowles, who when in his sermon he momentarily confused the Sadducees with the Pharisees, received immediately an overwhelmingly long and erudite letter from Coleridge correcting his error, and with the urbane threat, as Bowles must have seen it, « Health and weather permitting, I shall enjoy the pleasure of your Sermon, your Requiem, and your Mrs Bowles's, and your good friends' company on Sunday next ».

But even when the early enchantment of Bowles's sonnets had decayed, their author could be helpful to Coleridge's poetic ambitions, as late as the year of Waterloo. « I am about to send a volume of MS. poems in the course of a few weeks to Lord Byron, to whom I was encouraged by Mr Bowles to write, and from whom I received a no less kind than condescending answer » he told the poet Rogers, in May, 1815. « I trust that they will appear to him not likely to disgrace any recommendation from him. Mr Bowles », he continued, « leaves Bremhill on Monday next for town. The being so near him has been a source of constant gratification to me. He has an improved edition of his Missionary in the press, and a volume of sermons worthy of a calm-minded clergyman, and which will, I trust, contribute to counteract the poison of Fanaticism, by way of preventive antidote; for the already diseased are incurable ». Nor were sermons and weak verse the only productions in these later years. Antiquarian and ecclesiastical interests at times claimed Bowles's pen.

Yet within eighteen months of Bowles's assistance with Byron, Coleridge, now a confirmed opium addict, quarrelled with Bowles, as with all his friends. He had now left Calne and was permanently ensconced with the Gillmans at Highgate. To a friend, on December 5th, 1816, he sent a violent denunciation of Hazlitt, and in a postscript complained of Bowles, as an ingrate. He has published a sermon which will, he hopes, annoy Bowles. « What Bowles will think and say, I know beforehand—tho' I have not, thank God! quite so clear an insight into what his feelings were when he read the first chapter of my Biographical Sketches [Biographia Literaria]—if indeed he collated the passages with his own speeches etc concerning me. Alas! I injured myself irreparably with him by devoting a fortnight to the correction of his Poem. He took the corrections and never forgave the corrector ». So, almost as in the mood of Bowles's sonnet, had Time destroyed the enthusiasm of Coleridge's youth.

Bowles continued writing regularly into old age, but these more pretentious works are now rightly forgotten. No more than his social prestige and earthly « paradise » have they assured the worthy Canon his slender hold on immortality; that comes from the small volume of simple, sad and sincere communings with nature in his sensitive and unhappy youth, and its effects upon another youthful poet whose immortality rests assured. Bowles touched the heart of an age of « Sense and sensibility ». « Genius of the sacred fountain of tears », Lamb told Coleridge in 1796, « it was he who led you through all this valley of weeping ». But, small in itself, the volume had enormous consequences. Exactly a century after Lamb's jest, a leading critic wrote: « so far as poetical rivers have any single source, the first tricklings of the stream which welled into fulness with the Lyrical Ballads, and some few years later swept all before it, may be assigned to this very feeble fount ».

Notes

1. The following extracts from Coleridge's Introduction to his sixpenny pamphlet, show how fundamental Bowles was to his early idea of a sonnet. « Charlotte Smith and Bowles are they who first made the Sonnet popular among the present English: I am justified therefore by analogy in deducing its laws from their compositions. The Sonnet then is a small poem, in which some lonely feeling is developed … Poems in which no lonely feeling is developed are not sonnets because the author has chosen to write them in fourteen lines ». Granted the essential « lonely feeling », whatever its cause: « Those sonnets appear to me the most exquisite, in which moral sentiments, affections, or feelings, are deduced from, and associated with, the scenery of Nature. Such compositions generate a habit of thought highly favourable to delicacy of character. They create a sweet and indissoluble union between the intellectual and the material world. … Hence the sonnets of Bowles derive their marked superiority over all other sonnets; hence they domesticate with the heart, and become, as it were, a part of our identity ». Coleridge is of the Eighteenth Century in ignoring the sonnets of Shakespeare.

2. In February 1797, Sheridan, through a friend of Bowles, asked Coleridge to write a tragedy for him. The result was Osorio, written with many groans of distaste and rejected by Sheridan. Its monument is two ingratiating letters of Coleridge to Bowles. The first, dated 16 March, 1797, appears to be Coleridge's first letter to the poet; the second, dated 16 October, 1797, accompanies Osorio, and requests Bowles to transmit it to Sheridan « with all speed » and to « be so kind as to write to him on the subject ».