prose. The perusal of a slim volume of the sonnets of William Lisle
Bowles was the small occasion from which sprang the great event of
Lamb's and Coleridge's commencing to write poetry. To the sonnet form
Lamb returned again and again, sometimes most felicitously, for two or
three of his sonnets have that haunting quality which makes them
remain in the mind. This one, with its familiar close, may stand as
representative of the days when Bowles was still the god of his
poetic idolatry:

The Lord of Life shakes off his drowsihed,
And 'gins to sprinkle on the earth below
Those rays that from his shaken locks do flow;
Meantime, by truant love of rambling led,
I turn my back on thy detested walls,
Proud City! and thy sons, I leave behind,
A sordid, selfish, money-getting kind;
Brute things, who shut their ears when Freedom calls.

I pass not thee so lightly, well-known spire,
That minded me of many a pleasure gone,
Of merrier days, of love and Islington;
Kindling afresh the flames of past desire.
And I shall muse on thee, slow journeying on
To the green plains of pleasant Hertfordshire.

In his blank verse--and couplets--of the same period, the time when he
was yet in the early twenties of his age, Lamb shows himself an apt
disciple of Cowper (to whom, by the way, he addressed a brief poem in
this form "On His Recovery from an Indisposition"). These, however,
were but the steps of a born writer learning his craft by more or less