We must not allow a poet of the tender and manly feeling of Mr. Bowles to pass away from among us with a mere notice of his death amid the common gossip of the week. The peculiar excellence of his Sonnets and his influence on English poetry deserve a further notice at our hands.
The Rev. William Lisle Bowles, of an ancient family in the county of Wilts, was born in the village of King's Sutton, in Northamptonshire—a parish of which his father was vicar—on the 24th of September, 1762. His mother was the daughter of Dr. Richard Gray, chaplain to Nathaniel Crew, bishop of Durham. He was educated at Winchester School, under Dr. Joseph Warton, and rose to be the senior boy. Warton took much notice of him; and, on his removal to Oxford, in 1782, was the means, we have heard, of inducing him to enter at Trinity College, of which Tom Warton was then the senior Fellow. "Among my contemporaries at Trinity," he says, "were several young men of talents and literature—Headley, Kett, Benwell, Dallaway, Richards, Dornford." Of these Headley is still remembered by some beautiful pieces of poetry, distinguished for imagery, pathos, and simplicity.
Mr. Bowles became a poet in print in his twenty-seventh year—publishing in 1789 a very small volume in quarto, with the very modest title of "Fourteen Sonnets." His excellencies were not lost on the public; and in the same year appeared a second edition, with seven additional sonnets. "I had just entered on my seventeenth year," says Coleridge, in his "Biographia Literaria," "when the Sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty-one in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me by a schoolfellow [at Christ's Hospital] who had quitted us for the University. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions—as the best presents I could offer to those who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author." Coleridge was always consistent in his admiration of Mr. Bowles. Charlotte Smith and Bowles, he says—writing in 1797—are they who first made the sonnet popular among the present generation of English readers; and in the same year in which this encomium was printed, his own volume of poetry contains "Sonnets attempted in the manner of Mr. Bowles." "My obligations to Mr. Bowles," he adds in another place, "were indeed important, and for radical good;" and that his approbation might not be confined to prose, he has said in verse:
"My heart has thanked thee, Bowles, for those soft strains
Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
Of wild bees in the sunny showers of spring."
Mr. Bowles's sonnets were descriptive of his personal feelings; and the manly tenderness which pervades them was occasioned, he tells us, by the sudden death of a deserving young woman with whom
"Sperabat longos, heu! ducere soles,
Et fido acclinis consenuisse sinu."
An eighth edition appeared in 1802; and a ninth and a tenth have since been demanded.
While at Trinity—where he took his degree in 1792—Mr. Bowles obtained the Chancellor's prize for a Latin poem. On leaving the University he entered into holy orders, and was appointed to a curacy in Wiltshire; from which he was preferred to a living in Gloucestershire—and in 1803 to a canonry in Salisbury Cathedral. His next step was to the rectory of Bremhill in Wiltshire—to which he was presented by Archbishop Moore. Here he remained till his death—beloved by his parishioners and by all who had the pleasure of his acquaintance. A volume of his sermons ("Paulus Parochialis"), designed for country congregations, was published in 1826.
The Sonnets were followed, at an Horatian interval, by other poems hardly of an inferior quality: such, for instance, as his "Hope, an Allegorical Sketch"—"St. Michael's Mount"—"Coombe Ellen"—and "Grave of Howard." His "Spirit of Discovery by Sea," the longest of his productions, was published in 1804, and is now chiefly remembered by the unhappy notoriety which Lord Byron obtained for it by asserting in his "English Bards" that the poet had made the woods of Madeira tremble to a kiss. Lord Byron subsequently acknowledged that he had mistaken Mr. Bowles's meaning: too late, however, to remove the injurious impression which his hasty reading had occasioned. Generally, Mr. Bowles's more ambitious works may be ranked as superior to the poems of Crowe and Carrington—both of which in their day commanded a certain reputation—and as higher in academical elegance than the verse of Mr. James Montgomery; while they have neither the nerve and occasional nobility of Cowper, nor that intimate mixture of fancy, feeling, lofty contemplations, and simple themes and images which have placed Wordsworth at the head of a school.
The school of the Wartons was not the school of Pope; and the comparatively low appreciation of the great poetical satirist, which Mr. Bowles entertained and asserted in print, was no doubt imbibed at Winchester under Joseph Warton, and strengthened at Oxford under Tom. Mr. Bowles's edition of Pope is a very poor performance. He had little diligence, and few indeed of the requirements of an editor. He undertook to traduce the moral character of Pope; and the line in which Lord Byron refers to him on that account