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 Penseroso” school, but with a more personal note, explained by a recent bereavement of the poet.  “Those who know him,” says the preface, “know the occasions of them to have been real, to the public he might only mention the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom

  “Sperabat longos heu! ducere soles,
  Et fido acclinis consumuisse sinu. . . .

“This is nothing to the public; but it may serve in some measure to obviate the common remark on melancholy poetry, that it has been very often gravely composed, when possibly the heart of the writer had very little share in the distress he chose to describe.  But there is a great difference between natural and fabricated feelings even in poetry.”  Accordingly while the Miltonic group of last-century poets went in search of dark things—­grots, caverns, horrid shades, and twilight vales; Bowles’ mood bestowed its color upon the most cheerful sights and sounds of nature.  The coming of summer or spring; the bells of Oxford and Ostend; the distant prospect of the Malvern Hills, or the chalk cliffs of Dover; sunrise on the sea, touching “the lifted oar far off with sudden gleam”; these and the like move him to tears equally with the glimmer of evening, the sequestered woods of Wensbeck, the ruins of Netley Abbey,[9] or the frowning battlements of Bamborough Castle, where

  “Pity, at the dark and stormy hour
  Of midnight, when the moon is hid on high,
    Keeps her lone watch upon the topmost tower.”

In “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” Byron calls Bowles “the maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers,” whose

        “. . . muse most lamentably tells
  What merry sounds proceed from Oxford bells.” [10]

Bowles’ attitude had thus something more modern than that of the eighteenth-century elegiacs, and in unison with Coleridge’s doctrine, that

        “. . . we receive but what we give,
  And in our life alone does nature live: 
  Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud.” [11]