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."

Side by side with this sensitiveness to colour, or interfused with it, we
find a similar, or perhaps a greater, sensitiveness to sound, Coleridge
shows a greater sensitiveness to music than any English poet except Milton.
The sonnet to Linley records his ecstatic responsiveness to music;
Purcell's music, too, which he names with Palestrina's ("some madrigals
which he heard at Rome") in the "Table-Talk." "I have the intensest delight
in music," he says there, "and can detect good from bad"; a rare thing
among poets. In one of his letters he notes: "I hear in my brain ...
sensations ... of various degrees of pain, even to a strange sort of uneasy
pleasure.... I hear in my brain, and still more in my stomach." There we
get the morbid physical basis of a sensitiveness to music which came to
mean much to him. In a note referring to "Christabel," and to the reasons
why it had never been finished, he says: "I could write as good verse now
as ever I did, if I were perfectly free from vexations, and were in the
_ad libitum_ hearing of fine music, which has a sensible effect in
harmonizing my thoughts, and in animating and, as it were, lubricating my
inventive faculty." "Christabel," more than anything of Coleridge, is
composed like music; you might set at the side of each section, especially
of the opening, _largo, vivacissimo_, and, as the general expression
signature, _tempo rubato_. I know no other verse in which the effects
of music are so precisely copied in metre. Shelley, you feel, sings like a
bird; Blake, like a child or an angel; but Coleridge certainly writes
music.

The metre of the "Ancient Mariner" is a re-reading of the familiar ballad-