Naturally the senses of hearing and sight provided him with a much greater proportion of his imagery than the inferior, less noble senses. He had a musician's love of music and a painter's eye for variations of light and colour. And for all the different kinds of sound and smell and taste and sensations of touch, he possessed a store of words which any of the greatest poets might have envied. In short, he was by nature endowed with qualities which in combination, and in their full development, constituted supreme capacity to perceive and to reproduce all the beauty of nature. To be able to reproduce it was from the very beginning his dream; and the man who affirmed that, except in the matter of art, he had no "opinions," expressed enthusiastic approval of the revolution of opinion in regard to the artificial, so-called classical, poetry of the eighteenth century, which had been brought about by Wordsworth and Coleridge. Spenser was Keats's idol, the classic poets were his aversion. In his poem, _Sleep and Poetry_, he has embodied an artistic confession of faith in language which could not well be more violent. After describing the old poetic triumphs of England, he exclaims: "Could all this be forgotten? Yes, a schism Nurtured by foppery and barbarism Made great Apollo blush for this his land. Men were thought wise who could not understand His glories; with a puling infant's force They sway'd about upon a rocking-horse And thought it Pegasus. Ah! Dismal-soul'd! The winds of heaven blew, the ocean roll'd Its gathering waves; ye felt it not. The blue Bared its eternal bosom, and the dew Of summer night collected still to make The morning precious; Beauty was awake! Why were _ye_ not awake? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . No, they went about. Holding a poor decrepit standard out, Mark'd with most flimsy mottoes, and, in large, The name of one Boileau!" Long before the French assault upon this ancient, honoured name, Keats blows the war-trumpet! Théophile Gautier himself does not treat it with greater contempt. It was probably the above passage, the energetic style of which reminds one of that picture of Kaulbach's in Munich, in which the artist of the rococo period is painted asleep with the lay-figure in his arms, which gave occasion to Byron's repeated thrusts at Keats as the traducer of Pope. For Keats never published a line against Pope; and when Countess Guiccioli, in her naïve work on Byron, refers to attacks which infuriated her lover, she is only repeating vague remarks she has heard. It is, however, highly probable that Keats included Pope among those whom he reproached with being deaf to the music of the waves and the winds, and with sleeping whilst the morning unfolded its beauties.