Rossetti called Coleridge the Turner of poets, and indeed there is in Coleridge an aërial glitter which we find in no other poet, and in Turner only among painters. With him colour is always melted in atmosphere, which it shines through like fire within a crystal. It is liquid colour, the dew on flowers, or a mist of rain in bright sunshine. His images are for the most part derived from water, sky, the changes of weather, shadows of things rather than things themselves, and usually mental reflections of them. "A poet ought not to pick Nature's pocket," he said, and it is for colour and sound, in their most delicate forms, that he goes to natural things. He hears "the merry nightingale That crowds and hurries and precipitates With fast thick warble his delicious notes;" and an ecstasy comes to him out of that natural music which is almost like that of his own imagination. Only music or strange effects of light can carry him swiftly enough out of himself, in the presence of visible or audible things, for that really poetic ecstasy. Then all his languor drops off from him, like a clogging garment. The first personal merit which appears in his almost wholly valueless early work is a sense of colour. In a poem written at twenty-one he sees Fancy "Bathed in rich amber-glowing floods of light," and next year the same colour reappears, more expressively, in a cloud, "wholly bright, With a rich and amber light." The two women in "The Two Graves," during a momentous pause, are found discussing whether the rays of the sun are green or amber; a valley is "Tinged yellow with the rich departing light;" seen through corn at evening, "The level sunshine glimmers with green light;" and there is the carefully observed "western sky And its peculiar tint of yellow green." "The Ancient Mariner" is full of images of light and luminous colour in sky and sea; Glycine's song in "Zapolya" is the most glittering poem in our language, with a soft glitter like that of light seen through water. And he is continually endeavouring, as later poets have done on a more deliberate theory, to suffuse sound with colour or make colours literally a form of music; as in an early poem "Where melodies round honey-dropping flowers, Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise, Nor pause, nor perch, hovering on untamed wing." With him, as with some of them, there is something pathological in this sensitiveness, and in a letter written in 180O he says: "For the last month I have been trembling on through sands and swamps of evil and bodily grievance. My eyes have been inflamed to a degree that rendered reading scarcely possible; and, strange as it seems, the act of mere composition, as I lay in bed, perceptibly affected them, and my voluntary ideas were every minute passing, more or less transformed into vivid spectra."