“It was Allston,” said Leslie, “who first awakened what little sensibility I may possess to the beauties of color. For long time I took the merit of the Venetians on trust, and if left to myself should have preferred works which I now feel to be comparatively worthless. I remember when the picture of ‘The Ages’ by Titian was first pointed out to me by Allston as an exquisite work, I thought he was laughing at me.” Leslie, if not a great colorist, was seldom incorrect; Stuart Newton had a fine eye for color, and Malbone was emphatically a colorist; but Allston’s sensibility to color was rare among artists, and the refinement of his mind was as unusual as the delicacy of his eye. Allston was also singular in the liberality of his sympathies. “I am by nature, as it respects the arts, a wide liker,” he said. In Rome he became acquainted with Coleridge; and the remark of Coleridge which seemed to make most impression on him in their walks “under the pines of the Villa Borghese” was evidently agreeable because it expressed his own feelings. “It was there he taught me this golden rule: never to judge of any work of art by its defects.” His admiration for the classics did not prevent him from admiring his contemporaries; his journey through Switzerland not only showed him a new world of Nature, but also “the truth of Turner’s Swiss scenes,--the poetic truth,--which none before or since have given.” For a young American art-student in 1804, such sympathies were remarkable; not so much because they were correct, as because they were neither American nor English. Neither in America nor in Europe at that day could art-schools give to every young man, at the age of twenty-five, eyes to see the color of Titian, or imagination to feel the “poetic truth” of Turner.