kevis goodman spun round and round” and so on The “Ancyent Marinere,” “Christabel” – such poems and protagonists are each so very poorly described by Petronius Arbiter’s happily precipitant “free spirit” that we should realize how very wishful the Biographia’s description of poetic legitimacy is, how much more honored in the breach than in the acceptance Coleridge’s theory may argue strenuously for meter as a form of voluntary motion, but his verse practice suggests his fascination with poetry as a “disease of volition,” enacting and thematizing compulsory motion.25 “Motions that are sent he knows not whence”: history, or feelings beyond science in The Prelude Wordsworth did not offer a formal riposte to the Biographia Literaria, although it is an interesting thought exercise to imagine what that would have been I would like to propose that had he done so, the form of his response would be a passage he had written for the 1805 Prelude and preserved for the 1850 Prelude It will look familiar by now, since it is a transposition of the nostalgia/calenture topos: As one who hangs down-bending from the side Of a slow-moving Boat upon the breast Of a still water, solacing himself With such discoveries as his eye can make Beneath him in the bottom of the deeps, Sees many beauteous sights, weeds, fishes, flowers, Grots, pebbles, roots of trees, and fancies more, Yet often is perplex’d, and cannot part The shadow from the substance, rocks and sky, Mountains and clouds, from that which is indeed The region, and the things which there abide In their true dwelling; now is cross’d by gleam Of his own image, by a sun-beam now, And motions that are sent he knows not whence, Impediments that make his task more sweet; – Such pleasant office have we long pursued Incumbent o’er the surface of past time With like success.26 Recollection is rendered here as the kind of mental travel Coleridge advised as an effect of reading poetry – the mind excited by the attractions of the journey, purposeful without a purpose This is also therefore the moment when the former disease of mobility (signaled by the residue of the green fields in the sea subplot) is turned into a figure of speech, and the symptom 212 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008