AN ear for music is a very different thing from a taste for music. I have no ear whatever; I could not sing an air to save my life; but I have the intensest delight in music, and can detect good from bad. Naldi, a good fellow, remarked to me once at a concert, that I did not seem much interested with a piece of Rossini’s which had just been performed. I said, it sounded to me like nonsense verses. But I could scarcely contain myself when a thing of Beethoven’s followed.
Table Talk.
Some music is above me; most music is beneath me. I like Beethoven and Mozart—or else some of the aerial compositions of the elder Italians, as Palestrina and Carissimi—And I love Purcell.
The best sort of music is what it should be—sacred; the next best, the military, has fallen to the lot of the Devil.
Good music never tires me, nor sends me to sleep. I feel physically refreshed and strengthened by it, as Milton says he did.
Table Talk.
I have no technical knowledge of Music. I wish, I had. I receive deep sensations, yea, intellectual activities from it; but what it is that so affects me, I know not. I love it, as a Blind man in love who thrills at the touch of her he thinks so beautiful because he feels so dear. Music seems to have an immediate communion with my Life; I have no power of tracing it thro’ my Ear, no consciousness of it in its’ march or passage, except when it ceases to be music for me, and becomes mere unpleasant or idle sound. It converses with the life of my mind, as if it were itself the Mind of my Life. Yet I sometimes think, that a great Composer, a Mozart, a Beethoven must have been in a state of Spirit much more akin, more analogous, to mine own when I am at once waiting for, watching, and organically constructing and inwardly constructed by, the Ideas, the living Truths, that may be re-excited but cannot be expressed by Words, the Transcendents that give the Objectivity to all Objects, the Form to all Images, yet are themselves untranslatable into any Image, unrepresentable by any particular Object than I can imagine myself to be to a Titian, or a Sir C. Wren. Yet I wish I did know something more of the wondrous mystery of this mighty Art Magic, were it but to understand why it is that ignorant as I am I should feel so utter, so extreme a difference between the Musical Compositions of Beethoven, Mozart, and our own Purcell for instance, and those of the equally celebrated Rossini and others which are just like nonsense verses to me, which I know to be meant for a Poem because I distinguish the rhymes.
But I must be content in this, as in my other vain regret and craving for an insight into and comprehension of the mysteries of the Transcendental Analysis of the great French and German Mathematicians. S. T. Coleridge.
MS.
It is a poor compliment to pay to a painter to tell him that his figure stands out of the canvas, or that you start at the likeness of the portrait. Take almost any daub, cut it out of the canvas, and place the figure looking into or out of a window, and any one may take it for life. Or take one of Mrs. Salmon’s wax queens or generals, and you will very sensibly feel the difference between a copy, as they are, and an imitation, of the human form, as a good portrait ought to be. Look at that flower vase of Van Huysum, and at these wax or stone peaches and apricots! The last are likest to their original, but what pleasures do they give? None, except to children.
Table Talk.
Poem. Address on W. Alston’s larger Landscape sent by sea to England. Threnic on the perishability by accident as well as time, and the narrow Sphere of action of Pictures. Printing: yet even MSS, Homer, &c. &c. &c.—but Apelles, Protogenes, ah where?—Spenser’s Faery Queen, VI last Books, and his Comedies—but on what authority does this rest?
‘Sorrowful yet true Speech of Artists, “burnt or gone to England”, which is the same as if the Picture were burnt.’
MS.
A far more subtle and difficult, yet I would fain believe not hopeless investigation [than an analysis of line and lines] would be respecting the symbolical characters or Significancy of Colors. But for this I am not prepared—I can merely glimpse it from the Mount Pisgah in the distance.
MS.
The architectural genius consists in the power of aptly, becomingly, and proportionally inclosing, subinclosing and applying in all its dimensions a given Space, the place of which remains the same, for a given end or ends; and of producing a unity of the exterior surface, expressing at once the greater or less manifoldness of the Spaces contained and the characteristic purpose of the whole, not without a correspondency and reciprocity of effect to [the object].
MS.
‘Artistrial’=concentrated Sense of the Beautiful 
the pleasure in Beauty modified by the sense of Propriety, and Rank in Life. See an artist’s Room, see a littery literary Man’s Room! All in disorder—much dirt, more Confusion. But here and there some exquisitely finished Form or Combinations of Form—in the production no less than in the contemplation of which the Painter (whether Poet and likewise technically Painter; or Poet whose Paintings, like those of the camera obscura, have only a present endurance to his own eye, and for others can act only as the Sun and Landscape conjoined—i.e. on minds so pre-disposed and pre-harmonized as to be camerae picturabiles) annihilates for himself all non-pertinent Objects, which co-exist with his compositions only to the Eye of his Visitors. Now a well-attuned and sensitive female mind must have the whole of the given Space in keeping; it requires the callus of an extreme stimulation to be able to endure the rags, brushes and broken Gallipots of an Allston, or the scattered Books, fluttering Pamphlets, and dusty Paper-wilderness of a Wordsworth. I know but two individuals who combine both, viz—the Ladylike Wholeness with creative delight in particular forms—and these are Mr. Robert Southey, Poet Laureate, &c. &c. &c., and Mr. Sam Tayl. Coleridge, whose whole Being has been unfortunately little more than a far-stretched series of Et Ceteras.
Calne, Wiltshire. 20 May, 1815.