Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud." [11]

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.