because of the transcendental character of a portion of his poetry. But
whatever may be true of the other members of the group, Coleridge at his
best was a romantic poet. "Christabel" and "The Ancient Mariner,"
creations so exquisite sprung from the contact of modern imagination with
mediaeval beliefs, are enough in themselves to justify the whole romantic
movement.

Among the literary influences which gave shape to Coleridge's poetry,
Percy's ballads and Chatterton's "Rowley Poems" are obvious and have
already been mentioned. In his first volume of verse (1796), there is
manifest a still stronger impulse from the sonnets of the Rev. William
Lisle Bowles. We have noticed the reappearance of this discarded stanza
form in the work of Gray, Mason, Edwards, Stillingfleet, and Thomas
Warton, about the middle of the last century.[6] In 1782 Mrs. Charlotte
Smith published a volume of sonnets, treating motives from Milton, Gray,
Collins, Pope's "Eloisa" and Goethe's "Werther." But the writer
who--through his influence upon Wordsworth more especially--contributed
most towards the sonnet revival, was Bowles. In 1789 he had published a
little collection of fourteen sonnets,[7] which reached a second edition
with six pieces additional, in the same year. "His sonnets came into
Wordsworth's hands (1793)," says Brandl, "just as he was leaving London
with some friends for a morning's excursion; he seated himself in a
recess on Westminster Bridge, and was not to be moved from his place till
he had finished the little book. Southey, again, owned in 1832 that for
forty years, he had taken the sweet and artless style of Bowles for a
model." [8] In the first chapter of his "Biographia Literaria" (1817)
Coleridge tells how, when he had just entered on his seventeenth year,
"the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number and just then published in a
quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented" to him by his
school-fellow at Christ's Hospital, Thomas Middleton, afterwards Bishop
of Calcutta. "It was a double pleasure to me . . . that I should have
received, from a friend so revered, the first knowledge of a poet by
whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and
inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the
undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal with which I laboured to make
proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed,
of whatever rank and in whatever pla