ph
Warton's Winchester wonders," says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the
second edition of Campbell's "Specimens of the British Poets"; "and the
taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened
and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton
was master there." Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned
his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody
written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester
College. His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian
manner; the "castle gleaming on the distant steep"; "the pale moonlight
in the midnight aisle"; "some convent's ancient walls," along the Rhine.
Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley
Abbey:

"The beam
Of evening smiles on the gray battlement,
And yon forsaken tower that time has rent."

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the
"elvish" things in the plays; "The Tempest," "Midsummer Night's Dream,"
the weird sisters in "Macbeth," Ophelia's songs, the melancholy Jacques.
The lines to Burke on his "Reflections on the Revolution in France," echo
his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry:

"Though now no more proud chivalry recalls
The tourneys bright and pealing festivals;
Though now on high her idle spear is hung,
Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung," etc.[13]

The "Hymn to Woden" alludes to Gray's "Fatal Sisters." "St. Michael's
Mount" summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy,

"Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage
The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . .
Would fain the shade of elder days recall,
The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall;
Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme;
Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime,
Pause o'er the working of some wondrous tale,
Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!"

Bowles' influence is traceable in Coleridge's earliest volume of verse
(1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility. This
elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like "Happiness," "The
Sigh," "To a Young Ass," "To the Autumnal Moon," "Lines on an Autumnal
Evening," "To the Nightingale"; in "Melancholy: A Fragment" and "Elegy;
imitated from Akenside," both in the "Sibylline Leaves" (1797); and in
numerous "lines," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14]
Coleridge soon cam