It was very natural that Coleridge should prove to be one of the first subjects discussed by Rossetti, who admired him greatly, and when it transpired that Coleridge was, perhaps, my own chief idol, and that whilst even yet a child I had perused and reperused not only his poetry but even his mystical philosophy (impalpable or obscure even to his maturer and more enlightened, if no more zealous, admirers), the disposition to write upon him became great upon both sides. “You can never say too much about Coleridge for me,” Rossetti would write, “for I worship him on the right side of idolatry, and I perceive you know him well.” Upon this one of my first remarks was that there was much in Coleridge’s higher descriptive verse equivalent to the landscape art of Turner. The critical parallel Rossetti warmly approved of, adding, however, that Coleridge, at his best as a pictorial artist, was a spiritualised Turner. He instanced his, We listened and looked sideways up, The moving moon went up the sky And no where did abide, Softly she was going up, And a star or two beside-- The charmed water burnt alway A still and awful red. I remarked that Shelley possessed the same power of impregnating landscape with spiritual feeling, and this Rossetti readily allowed; but when I proceeded to say that Wordsworth sometimes, though rarely, displayed a power akin to it, I found him less warmly responsive. “I grudge Wordsworth every vote he gets,” {*} Rossetti frequently said to me, both in writing, and afterwards in conversation. “The three greatest English imaginations,” he would sometimes add, “are Shakspeare, Coleridge, and Shelley.” I have heard him give a fourth name, Blake. * There is a story frequently told of how, seeing two camels walking together in the Zoological Gardens, keeping step in a shambling way, and conversing with one another, Rossetti exclaimed: “There’s Wordsworth and Ruskin virtuously taking a walk!” He thought Wordsworth was too much the High Priest of Nature to be her lover: too much concerned to transfigure into poetry his pantheo-Christian philosophy regarding Nature, to drop to his knees in simple love of her to thank God that she was beautiful. It was hard to side with Rossetti in his view of Wordsworth, partly because one feared he did not practise the patience necessary to a full appreciation of that poet, and was consequently apt to judge of him by fugitive lines read at random. In the connection in question, I instanced the lines (much admired by Coleridge) beginning Suck, little babe, O suck again! It cools my blood, it cools my brain, and ending-- The breeze I see is in the tree, It comes to cool my babe and me.