Born 24th September 1762, at King’s Sutton vicarage, Northamptonshire. Educated at Winchester and Trinity College, Oxford; in 1804 he became a prebendary of Salisbury and rector of Bremhill, in Wiltshire. Here he spent in easy circumstances the rest of his long life, dying at Salisbury, 7th April 1850. His “Fourteen Sonnets, written chiefly on Picturesque Spots during a Journey” (1789), had Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey among their enthusiastic admirers; and through his influence over them Bowles may be looked on as the founder of a school of English poetry in which his own name was soon eclipsed by theirs. Of his subsequent poetical works (14 vols. 1789–1837), the longest is “The Spirit of Discovery,” and the best, perhaps, the “Missionary of the Andes.” In 1806 he published an edition of Pope, and an opinion which he expressed on Pope’s poetical merits led to a rather memorable controversy (1809–25), in which Campbell and Byron were his antagonists. Of his prose writings may be mentioned a rather dry “Life of Bishop Ken” (2 vols. 1830). See the Memoir by Gilfillan prefixed to his collected poems (Edin. 1855).

Personal

  My Sheridan task … interrupted by Bowles, who never comes amiss; the mixture of talent and simplicity in him are delightful. His parsonage house at Bremhill is beautifully situated, but he has a good deal frittered away its beauty with grottos, hermitages, and Shenstonian inscriptions: When company is coming he cries, “Here, John, run with the crucifix and missal to the hermitage, and set the fountain going.” His sheep-bells are tuned in thirds and fifths; but he is an excellent fellow notwithstanding; and if the waters of his inspiration be not those of Helicon, they are at least very sweet waters, and to my taste pleasanter than some that are more strongly impregnated.

  Madame de Staël had a great wish to see Mr. Bowles, the poet, or as Lord Byron calls him, the sonneteer; she admired his sonnets, and his “Spirit of Maritime Discovery,” and ranked him high as an English genius. In riding to Bowood he fell, and sprained his shoulder, but still came on. Lord Lansdowne alluded to this in presenting him to Madame de Staël before dinner in the midst of the listening circle. She began to compliment him and herself upon the exertion he had made to come and see her: “O ma’am, say no more, for I would have done a great deal more to see so great a curiosity!” Lord Lansdowne says it is impossible to describe the shock in Madame de Staël’s face—the breathless astonishment and the total change produced in her opinion of the man. She afterwards said to Lord Lansdowne, who had told her he was a simple country clergyman, “Je vois bien que ce n’est qu’ un simple curé qui n’a pas le sens commun, quoique grand poéte.”

  Mr. Bowles was very pleasant and sociable, talked a great deal of Lord Byron and the Pope question, in which we exactly agree, and in which, from not having read the prosy pamphlet in which he has so marred his own good cause, I was able to agree with him most conscientiously. Pray do you like his wife? Is not she a coarse, cold, hard woman, and rather vulgarish? All this she seemed to me. He is very unaffected and agreeable.

  He appeared to me an amiable, well-informed, and extremely able man. I am willing to believe him a good man, almost as good a man as Pope, but no better.

  Lisle Bowles is another name to be marked with a white stone. A delightful spot was Bremhill—indeed, is still—with the quaint garden, and the swans, Snowdrop and Lily, sailing up to the parlour window to inquire after their dinner, and Peter the hawk, and the Vicar holding his watch to his ear, to make sure that he had not grown deaf since breakfast. Southey visited the Parsonage when the lovable old man was in his seventy-third year, and presented to the eye of his friend the most entertaining mixture that could be of untidiness, simplicity, benevolence, timidity, and good nature; but nobody smiled at his oddities more heartily than the owner.

  Mr. Bowles had a blunt, almost a rough manner, which did not quite answer my preconceived (immature) idea of a poet. I had imagined that I should see a melancholy man, pressed down by love disappointed, and solemn with internal trouble; I found a cheerful married man, with no symptom of weakness or sentiment about him. He had a pretty garden at his Bremhill parsonage, where he erected a hermitage, and was unwise enough to endow it with a multitude of inscriptions; at which his neighbors were fond of laughing, as instances of affectation. For myself, I never saw anything affected or fantastic in this gentleman. His wife was a lady, tall, and of good manners; not ill adapted to a poet who had previously exhausted all his sorrows in song.

  All the anecdotes told of his eccentricities are pleasant, simple, and harmless; and Bowles the man was the faithful counterpart of Bowles the poet—pure in spirit, sweet in nature, and tender of heart—good rather than great.

  Latterly Bowles became very deaf, but he kept up the habit of going about as long as he could. Once on the occasion of the archdeacon’s visitation to Chippenham, Mr. Julian Young, as the last instituted incumbent in the district, had to preach the sermon. This gentleman, the son of Young the actor, was a very popular preacher, but full of gesticulations and display in the pulpit—a manner by no means approved by all his hearers. After church the assembled parsons always had a luncheon at the Angel Hotel. My informant, Sir Gabriel Goldney tells me that “It was the duty of Canon Bowles, as the oldest incumbent, to thank the new incumbent for his sermon.” In the somewhat droning but still emphatic way that Bowles had in speaking, he said—“Excellent sermon, Mr. Young—wonderful sermon. I never heard a word of it, but the acting was admirable.”

Sonnets

	Let sonneteering Bowles his strains refine,
	And whine and whimper to the fourteenth line.

  I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me…. It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I labored to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. 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…. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good.

  “The further development of the uses of the sonnet and the enlargement of its scope and influence are largely due to a poet upon whom the example of those who rejected the canon of the intellectual school of Addison and Pope had not been lost. The poet to whom I refer has not been accorded, nor indeed did he deserve to be accorded, the highest, or even a high poetical rank; but yet, unquestionably, he exerted a powerful plastic influence, especially as regards the powers and scope of the sonnet, upon two modern poets of acknowledged genius, whose writings have exercised a subtler, more widely diffused, and more permanent impression on English poetry than those of any other authors of modern times.”

  The sonnet work of William Lisle Bowles has a certain literary interest on account of the influence—a somewhat inexplicable one, it must be owned—which it exercised in the formation of the poetic taste of Coleridge.

  It is the fashion in the present day to speak slightingly of Bowles, but his sonnets have unquestionable merit. Their language is melodious to a degree which perhaps only Collins in that century had surpassed, and it expressed a tender melancholy, which may have been inspired also by the study of the same poet.

  Cowper, who died as may be remembered in the last year of the eighteenth century, wrote one fine poem of this class to Mary Unwin. Gradually the sonnet began to awake from its poetic hibernation, and though one or two women writers not altogether unworthily handled it, and though William Roscoe and Egerton Brydges even used it with moderate success, the first real breath of spring came in the mild advent of William Lisle Bowles. His sonnets move us now hardly at all, but when we remember the season of their production we may well regard them with more kindly liberality.

  His sonnets are simple, graceful, but withal tame productions, about which no enthusiasm is possible now; and yet Coleridge could say of them that they had done his heart more good than all the other books he ever read, excepting his Bible.

  The event which, strange to say, had the greatest influence upon Coleridge at this time, was the chance reading of Bowles’s “Sonnets;” these had been sent to him by his friend Middleton, who had entered Cambridge a year before. In this slight volume of twenty sonnets he met “nature unsophisticated by classic tradition,” and was captivated by their freshness, originality, and simplicity. He copied them again and again, in order that his friends might enjoy them with him. In writing to one of these, he says, “They have done my heart more good than all the other books I ever read excepting the Bible.” It is difficult for us in these days to conceive of a time when such influences could be produced by a little quarto. But Coleridge was not the only one over whom it cast its spell, for Wordsworth was not long after captivated by it. He first met the volume as he was leaving London with friends for a walk; he seated himself in a recess on Westminster Bridge, and kept them waiting until he read the twenty sonnets. We may call these incidents and their results chance if we please, but “it chanced—eternal God that chance did guide.” If we wish to see what was the character of that spark which thus kindled two natures, we have but to read a few of Bowles’s “Sonnets.” Although they may seem somewhat tame to us now, yet we must admit that they have what was needed to revive sick poetry,—directness of expression, genuine sensibility, and wholesome love of nature and man.

Pope Controversy

  Pope’s works have been twice given to the world by editors who cannot be taxed with the slightest editorial partiality towards his fame. The last of these is the Rev. Mr. Bowles, in speaking of whom I beg leave most distinctly to disclaim the slightest intention of undervaluing his acknowledged merit as a poet, however freely and fully I may dissent from his critical estimate of the genius of Pope.

  It had been more honourable in this gentleman, with his known prejudices against the class of poetry in which Pope will always remain unrivalled, to have declined the office of editor, than to attempt to spread among new generations of readers the most unfavourable and the most unjust impressions of the poet, and of the man.

  Bowles’s edition is not without its faults, it is indeed not without its vices, for it displays an animus against Pope which makes the editor unfair to his judgment of biographical details, as well as ungenerous in the picture which he draws of his author as a man. Yet Bowles has been justly termed the most poetical editor of Pope; and it was he who, under the influences of a new current in English literature with which Byron had more in common than he cared to know, first succeeded in establishing those defects in his author which no candid criticism can since pretend to overlook.

  His poetic sensibility was exquisite, and he was well-read, shrewd, and candid. His failing was a hurry of mind which disqualified him for a painstaking commentator. He was content to jot down in a careless, colloquial style the off-hand thoughts of his quick cultivated intellect, and he did not add much to the scanty explanations of Warton and Warburton. The chief merit of his edition is his excellent literary criticism, which is truer, deeper, and more refined than that of his old Winchester master. The estimate Bowles formed of the poetry and character of Pope was allowed to pass unchallenged for thirteen years, when some remarks of Campbell, in his “Specimens of British Poets,” commenced a controversy which lasted from 1819 to 1826. In the series of pamphlets he published to vindicate his opinions, Bowles exhibited his wonted acuteness, courage, and negligence. With all his slips in minor points the fresh facts which have come to light have more than confirmed his view of Pope’s moral obliquities, and in the discussion on the principles of poetry he reduced the whole of his adversaries to silence. He and Hazlitt were the only persons among the disputants, eminent or obscure, who showed any real comprehension of the subject.

  Mr. Bowles wrote a book upon Pope. Mr. Campbell abused Mr. Bowles’s book upon Pope. Mr. Bowles wrote an answer to Mr. Campbell’s abuse of Mr. Bowles’s book on Pope. Lord Byron wrote a letter to certain stars in Albemarle street in answer to Mr. Bowles’s answer to Mr. Campbell’s abuse of Mr. Bowles’s book on Pope. Jeremy Bentham, Esq., wrote a letter to Lord Byron about Lord Byron’s letter to certain stars in Albemarle street, in answer to Mr. Bowles’s answer to Mr. Campbell’s abuse of Mr. Bowles’s book on Pope. Mr. Bowles wrote an answer, not to Jeremy Bantham, but to Lord Byron’s letter to certain stars in Albermarle street, in answer to Mr. Bowles’s answer to Mr. Campbell’s abuse of Mr. Bowles’s book on Pope. Here the controversy ended, leaving each disputant more thoroughly satisfied with his own judgment.

  Bowles was without an ear for the versification, and without knowledge of the history of the eighteenth century, and contributed nothing to the elucidation of the confessed obscurities of Pope’s allusions.

  Though he was often wrong, and though his general view of the poet is too much coloured with animosity, Bowles may fairly lay claim to having exposed certain features in Pope’s real character, which had been altogether disguised in the pompous panegyrics of Warburton.

General

	My heart has thank’d thee, Bowles! for those soft strains
	Whose sadness soothes me, like the murmuring
	Of wild-bees in the sunny showers of spring!
	For hence not callous to the mourner’s pains
	Through Youth’s gay prime and thornless paths I went:
	And when the darker day of life began,
	And I did roam, a thought-bewildered man,
	Their mild and manliest melancholy lent
	A mingled charm, such as the pang consign’d
	To slumber, though the big tear it renew’d;
	Bidding a strange mysterious Pleasure brood
	Over the wavy and tumultuous mind,
	As the great Spirit erst with plastic sweep
	Mov’d on the darkness of the unform’d deep.

  Breathes not the man with a more poetical temperament than Bowles. No wonder that his eyes “love all they look on,” for they possess the sacred gift of beautifying creation, by shedding over it the charm of melancholy…. No vain repinings, no idle regrets, does his spirit ever breathe over the still receding Past. But time-sanctified are all the shews that arise before his pensive imagination; and the common light of day, once gone, in his poetry seems to shine as if it had all been dying sunset or moonlight, or the new-born dawn. His human sensibilities are so fine as to be in themselves poetical; and his poetical aspirations so delicate as to be felt always human. Hence his Sonnets have been dear to poets—having in them “more than meets the ear”—spiritual breathings that hang around the words like light around fair flowers; and hence, too, have they been beloved by all natural hearts who, having not the “faculty divine,” have yet the “vision”—that is, the power of seeing and of hearing the sights and the sounds which genius alone can awaken, bringing them from afar, out of the dust and dimness of vanishment.

  This morning I received your “St. John in Patmos.” I have just read the poem through, and with much pleasure. Yours I should have known it to have been by the sweet and unsophisticated style upon which I endeavoured, now almost forty years ago, to form my own.

  Bowles was an inferior artist to Rogers, although taste and elegance are also the chief features of his poetry…. The latter and more ambitious efforts of Lisle Bowles—for he wrote at least four long poems—could not be said to have been thoroughly, that is, eminently, successful. In all, passages of tender sentiment and fine description abound; but, on the whole, they were more the pumpings up, than the pourings out, of genius. His mind possessed more elegance than vigour; was rather reflective than imaginative. He is deficient in variety; and he ventured not, like Crabbe, to paint things exactly as he saw them; hence there is a sameness about his outlines that savours of mannerism. His familiar walk was amid the gentler affections of our nature; but his tenderness seldom rises into passion; or it is merely the anger of the dove,

“Pecking the hand that hovers o’er its mate.”

The Attic taste of his scholarship seemed to trammel that enthusiasm, essential for the creation of high lyric poetry; and in this he resembles Thomas Warton—to whom, in his descriptive sketches, as well as in his chivalresque tendencies, he bore a greater resemblance than to any other.

  His diction at the beginning of his career, both in verse and prose, was cumbrous and awkward; but he gradually acquired ease, directness, and elegance. His ear was always correct, and inclined to melodious composition. Yet in his greater blank-verse poems he shows himself acquainted with the intricacies and elaborate subtleties that enter into the production of harmony, and encounters and subdues difficulties with the courage and confidence that imply conscious skill and practised power. To the right-hearted and earnest student of poetry they will always be welcome, and not only be carefully perused, but sedulously studied, as examples of the art in which he would excel.

  Those who to-day turn to the much-praised verses will scarcely find in their pensive amenity that enduring charm which they presented to the hungry and restless soul of Coleridge, seeking its fitting food in unpropitious places. They exhibit a grace of expression, a delicate sensibility, and above all a “musical sweet melancholy” that is especially grateful in certain moods of mind; but with lapse of time and change of fashion they have grown a little thin and faint and colourless. Of Bowles’s remaining works it is not necessary to speak. He was over-matched in his controversy with Byron as to Pope, and the blunt

“Stick to thy sonnets, Bowles,—at least they pay”

of the former must be accepted as the final word upon the poetical efforts of the cultivated and amiable Canon of Salisbury.

  His was the first significant note of conscious transition from the formalism and the affected classicism of the epoch of Johnson and Pope to the lyric freedom of Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats. Even Bowles was rather an indication than a fulfilment. Though he revolved freely on his own individuality, he was not absolutely free from the conventionalities of poetry of his time. Nor did he fully indicate the breadth of the change that was to arise in his own later days. There were depths deeper and flights higher than his to follow; nevertheless, the significant fact is that he had the impulse and the courage to advance according to his light. Compared with his brilliant successors his light was doubtless dim, but on that very account is his case the more interesting, his attitude the more touching…. Bowles’ was an experiment, and he survived to witness his experiment become demonstrations of success in others.

  As the English romantic poets went forth both to combat the classic school with its super-sense and pride of strict rules, and to endow the poetry of the fairy tale with new life, their first halt was under the shadow of Bowles. Compared with such a poet of the intellect as Pope, who had maintained that, with a clear head and dexterous style, nothing was too prosaic to be converted into poetry, such an elegist as Bowles, who aimed at all effect through the heart, was a most refreshing contrast.

  One cannot help regretting that the inspiration did not come more directly from Cowper or Burns, or from both; but I confess my inability to join in the expression of amused wonder which has so often greeted Coleridge’s acknowledgments of his obligation to Bowles…. The first breath of Nature unsophisticated by classical tradition came to Coleridge from Bowles’s sonnets; and he recognised it at once. Nor was he alone in this experience. Four years, later, the same sonnets captivated Wordsworth.

  A country clergyman of leisure and means, he continued at long intervals to lift up his little light in the midst of the glory he had helped to kindle, sang sympathetically of the battle of the Nile, and the sorrows of Switzerland, and showed how little he comprehended the poetic revolution by galvanizing the defunct didactic poem into such semblance of vitality as belongs to his “Spirit of Discovery by Sea.”