Romantic poetry and the science of nostalgia of the present is converted into a simile about temporal distance and pleasing recollection – that “sweet task” and “pleasant office” in the passage Gone, too, is the hallucinatory but dangerous clarity of the watery screen in the earlier versions of this scene, which beguiled the boatman to leap in and seek death with fatal longing What emerges, as a result, is closer to the more familiar and safe nostalgia that others have described, the nostalgia that is “enamored of distance” (see my introduction, above) This viewer cannot see beneath the “surface of past time.” What preserves this benign indeterminacy, and keeps the bottoms from resolving into a deathly invitation? One answer is the very movement of the boat, that recurrent and conventional image in the Prelude for what Wordsworth called the “progress of my song” – that is, for the poem propelled gently by its meter, here represented as “slow-moving,” and more like the half-receding-fully-forward progressing motion of Coleridge’s dreams than the alternately static and madly kinetic unpiloted bark of “The Ancyent Marinere,” Coleridge’s nightmare However: the bark is not the only source of movement: there are also those “motions that are sent he knows not whence.” They intrigue, precisely because they are represented as arriving from outside the boat-poem and because they are strangely sourceless, with no identifiable origin A word search for Wordsworth will remind us that “motions” is a word of considerable complexity, as complex and ubiquitous in the Prelude as “sense.”27 And for the most part, Wordsworth would like to interpret them either in benign and pantheistic terms, like the “motion and spirit that rolls through all things” in “Tintern Abbey” (ll 101–3) or else benignly and physiologically, like the “motion of our human blood” in that same poem (44), or the “hallowed and pure motions of the sense” in the first book of the Prelude (1805, 1, l 551) Yet these “motions that are sent he knows not whence” in the Prelude passage not fit such available patterns easily As impulses without an identifiable source, they have the unpredictable potential of the arbitrary eddying currents that Coleridge deplored in his discussions of Hartley’s passive will At the same time, though, they are also no longer bodily motions, as in Hartley, or in Darwin’s sensuously rising “fibrous motions,” or in the medical literature on nostalgia and other diseases of the will Wordsworth is drawing on this literature, just as he is drawing on the specific nostalgia/calenture topos, but the physiological motions from the medical literature have moved outward, into the arena of context, “atmosphere,” air or environment The apperception of mobility that emerges from the relay of figurations (from the scientific to the poetic) is not the same that went into the medical dissertations and nosologies we started with The dialectical movement of history through its articulations – as I have tried to suggest, the movement whereby a 213 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008