A number of Bowles’ sonnets were addressed to rivers, the Tweed, the Cherwell at Oxford, the Wensbeck, and the Itchin near Winton, poems which stand midway between Thomas Warton’s “To the River Lodon” and Coleridge’s “To the River Otter,” with Wordsworth’s sonnet sequence, “On the River Duddon.”  A single sonnet of Bowles will be enough to give a taste of his quality and to show what Coleridge got from him.[12]

Bowles was a disciple in the “School of Warton.”  He was “one of Joseph Warton’s Winchester wonders,” says Peter Cunningham, in a note in the second edition of Campbell’s “Specimens of the British Poets”; “and the taste he imbibed there for the romantic school of poetry was strengthened and confirmed by his removal to Trinity College, Oxford, when Tom Warton was master there.”  Bowles was always prompt to own that he had learned his literary principles from the Wartons; and among his poems is a monody written on the death of his old teacher, the master of Winchester College.  His verses abound in Gothic imagery quite in the Wartonian manner; the “castle gleaming on the distant steep”; “the pale moonlight in the midnight aisle”; “some convent’s ancient walls,” along the Rhine.  Weak winds complain like spirits through the ruined arches of Netley Abbey: 

          “The beam
  Of evening smiles on the gray battlement,
  And yon forsaken tower that time has rent.”

His lines on Shakspere recall Collins in their insistence upon the “elvish” things in the plays; “The Tempest,” “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the weird sisters in “Macbeth,” Ophelia’s songs, the melancholy Jacques.  The lines to Burke on his “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” echo his celebrated dirge over fallen chivalry: 

  “Though now no more proud chivalry recalls
  The tourneys bright and pealing festivals;
  Though now on high her idle spear is hung,
  Though time her mouldering harp has half unstrung,” etc.[13]

The “Hymn to Woden” alludes to Gray’s “Fatal Sisters.”  “St. Michael’s Mount” summons up the forms of the ancient Druids, and sings how Fancy,

  “Sick of the fluttering fancies that engage
  The vain pursuits of a degenerate age, . . . 
  Would fain the shade of elder days recall,
  The Gothick battlements, the bannered hall;
  Or list of elfin harps the fabling rhyme;
  Or, wrapt in melancholy trance sublime,
  Pause o’er the working of some wondrous tale,
  Or bid the spectres of the castle hail!”

Bowles’ influence is traceable in Coleridge’s earliest volume of verse (1796) in a certain diffused softness and gentle sensibility.  This elegiac tone appears particularly in effusions like “Happiness,” “The Sigh,” “To a Young Ass,” “To the Autumnal Moon,” “Lines on an Autumnal Evening,” “To the Nightingale”; in “Melancholy:  A Fragment” and “Elegy; imitated from Akenside,” both in the “Sibylline Leaves” (1797); and in numerous “lines,”