Penseroso" school, but with a more personal
note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet. "Those who know
him," says the preface, "know the occasions of them to have been real, to
the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young
woman with whom

"Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles,
Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . .

"This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to
obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very
often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very
little share in the distress he chose to describe. But there is a great
difference between _natural_ and _fabricated_ feelings even in poetry."
Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search
of dark things--grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales;
Bowles' mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds
of nature. The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and
Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of
Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching "the lifted oar far off with sudden
gleam"; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of
evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9]
or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where

"Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high,
Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower."

In "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers" Byron calls Bowles "the maudlin
prince of mournful sonneteers," whose

". . . muse most lamentably tells
What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells." [10]

Bowles' attitude had thus something more modern than that of the
eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge's doctrine, that

". . . we receive but what we give,
And in our life alone does nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11]

A number of Bowles' sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the
Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which
stand midway between Thomas Warton's "To the River Lodon" and Coleridge's
"To the River Otter," with Wordsworth's sonnet sequence, "On the River
Duddon." A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his
quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12]

Bowles was a disciple in the "School of Warton." He was "one of Jose