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," "monodies," "epitaphs," "odes," and "stanzas." [14]
Coleridge soon came to recognise the weakness of his juvenile verses, and
parodied himself--and incidentally Bowles--in three sonnets printed at
the end of Chapter I. of the "Biographia Literaria," designed to