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 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. . . .