. . . 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 were 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