re cold, and, if I may so express
it, only dead-coloured; while in the best of Warton's, there is a
stiffness which too often gives them the appearance of imitations from
the Greek. Whatever relation, therefore, of cause or impulse, Percy's
collection of ballads may bear to the most popular poems of the present
day, yet in the more sustained and elevated style of the then living
poets, Cowper and Bowles were, to the best of my knowledge, the first who
combined natural thoughts with natural diction; the first who reconciled
the heart with the head." Coleridge adds in a note that he was not
familiar with Cowper's "Task" till many years after the publication of
Bowles' sonnets, though it had been published before them (1785).

It would be hard to account for the effect of Bowles' sonnets on
Coleridge, did we not remember that it is not necessarily the greatest
literature that comes home to us most intimately, but that which, for
some reason, touches us where we are peculiarly sensitive. It is a
familiar experience with every reader, that certain books make an appeal
to him which is personal and individual, an appeal which they make to few
other readers--perhaps to no other reader--and which no other books make
to him. It is something in them apart from their absolute value or
charm, or rather it is something in him, some private experience of his
own, some occult association in depths below consciousness. He has a
perfectly just estimate of their small importance in the abstract, they
are not even of the second or third rank. Yet they speak to him; they
seem written to him--are more to him, in a way, than Shakspere and Milton
and all the public library of the world. In the line of light bringers
who pass from hand to hand the torch of intelligential fire, there are
men of most unequal stature, and a giant may stoop to take the precious
flambeau from a dwarf. That Scott should have admired Monk Lewis, and
Coleridge reverenced Bowles, only proves that Lewis and Bowles had
something to give which Scott and Coleridge were peculiarly ready to
receive.

Bowles' sonnets, though now little read, are not unreadable. They are
tender in feeling, musical in verse, and pure in diction. They were
mostly suggested by natural scenery, and are uniformly melancholy.
Bowles could suck melancholy out of a landscape as a weasel sucks eggs.
His sonnets continue the elegiac strain of Shenstone, Gray, Collins,
Warton, and the whole "Il