ce. As my school finances did not
permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half,
more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to
those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight
did I receive the three or four following publications of the same
author." To Bowles' poems Coleridge ascribes the credit of having
withdrawn him from a too exclusive devotion to metaphysics and also a
strengthened perception of the essentially unpoetic character of Pope's
poetry. "Among those with whom I conversed there were, of course, very
many who had formed their taste and their notions of poetry from the
writings of Pope and his followers; or, to speak more generally, in that
school of French poetry, condensed and invigorated by English
understanding, which had predominated from the last century. I was not
blind to the merits of this school, yet . . . they gave me little
pleasure. . . . 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 smooth and 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."
Coleridge goes on to say that, in a paper written during a Cambridge
vacation, he compared Darwin's "Botanic Garden" to a Russian ice palace,
"glittering, cold, and transitory"; that he expressed a preference for
Collins' odes over those of Gray; and that in his defence of the lines
running into each other, instead of closing at each couplet; and of
natural language . . . such as "_I will remember thee_," instead of

". . . Thy image on her wing
Before my fancy's eye shall memory bring"

he had continually to appeal to the example of the older English poets
from Chaucer to Milton. "The reader," he concludes, "must make himself
acquainted with the general style of composition that was at that time
deemed poetry, in order to understand and account for the effect produced
on me by the sonnets, the 'Monody at Matlock' and the 'Hope' of Mr.
Bowles; for it is peculiar to original genius to become less and less
striking, in proportion to its success in improving the taste and
judgment of its contemporaries. The poems of West, indeed, had the merit
of chaste and manly diction, but they we