The reading of a prose 'Life of Gotz vou Berlichingen' afterwards stimulated him to delineate his character in a poetic form.

"The figure of a rude, well-meaning self-helper," he said, "in a wild anarchic time, excited my deepest sympathy." Keats was an insatiable reader when a boy; but it was the perusal of the 'Faerie Queen,' at the age of seventeen, that first lit the fire of his genius.

The same poem is also said to have been the inspirer of Cowley, who found a copy of it accidentally lying on the window of his mother's apartment; and reading and admiring it, he became, as he relates, irrecoverably a poet.
Coleridge speaks of the great influence which the poems of Bowles had in forming his own mind.

The works of a past age, says he, seem to a young man to be things of another race; but the writings of a contemporary "possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man.

His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope.