"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: