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.

But Rossetti would not see that this last couplet denoted the point of
artistic vision at which the poet of nature identified himself with her,
in setting aside or superseding all proprieties of mere speech. To him
Wordsworth's Idealism (which certainly had the German trick of keeping
close to the ground) only meant us to understand that the forsaken
woman through whose mouth the words are spoken (in _The Affliction of
Margaret_ ------ of ------) saw _the breeze shake the tree_ afar off.
And this attitu