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