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itself is offered to Coleridge as a concrete demonstration of his ability. In announcing that he hadbrought his ‘history’ to a close he declared:we have reachedThe time (which was our object from the first)When we may, not presumptuously, I hope,Suppose my powers so far confirmed, and suchMy knowledge, as to make me capableOf building up a work that should endure (XIII 304-9)This assertion, although voiced with a careful use of the humility topos, makes a substantialclaim. Wordsworth is declaring himself capable of actualising his potential as a poet. He feels that his‘power’ and ‘knowledge’ have developed into an enduring ‘capacity’, a habitual activity of his mind(a hexis), something that has indeed become his ‘nature’. It is this capacity or ‘capability’ that enableshim to speak ‘A lasting inspiration sanctified / By reason and by truth’, and it bears little relationshipto Arnold’s, or Coleridge’s, understanding of Wordsworth’s ‘extraordinary power’ to make us feelthrough some ‘accident of inspiration’. Wordsworth’s ‘power’ needs to be seen in technical terms, asdefined by Aristotle. It is a dynamis; specifically an entatative habitus, an established ‘power’; onethat enables a ‘virtue’ to operate almost automatically. This is the authority that Wordsworth is‘humbly’ claiming for himself in these lines. The same power was defined for ‘the Poet’, as describedin the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, whose utterances, as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerfulfeelings’ are virtuous, because they are the product of long and deep thinking – recollection intranquillity. The ‘spontaneous’ feelings expressed are therefore established ‘habits’ of mind that havebecome ‘second nature’; they are representations of a specific ethos. 13The Prelude presents a critique of emotional states of mind, and the wilder, ‘sublime’Imaginations of the inspired poet in his frenzy have to be tempered by the milder, ‘beautiful’, Fanciesof the civilised human mind. Those possessed of (or by) a strong imagination tend to lay waste thegroves that might otherwise shelter the dreaming poet in his fancies. 14 But the dreaming poet mustalso become more than an ‘idle dreamer’; his work must address the topics of ‘Man, Nature andHuman Life’, not ‘evade’ those ‘historical’ realities. Somewhere between these two opposite,traditional, representations of poetic inspiration, Wordsworth hopes to define a new ‘happy mean’,one that integrates ‘sublime’ Imaginations and ‘beautiful’ Fancies in a new art of poetry. To call thisnew art exemplary of Romanticism requires some justification – something that Coleridge attempted13 I return to the theory of the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in my concluding chapter. Coleridge, it should benoted, acknowledges this Aristotelian understanding of the growth of a genius - one that is not purely‘natural’- when defining the nature of Shakespeare’s genius, in contrast to Milton’s, in Chapter XV ofBiographia: ‘Shakespeare, no mere child of nature; no automaton of genius; no passive vehicle of inspirationpossessed by the spirit, not possessing it; first studied patiently, meditated deeply, understood minutely, tillknowledge become habitual and intuitive wedded itself to his habitual feelings, and at length gave birth tothat stupendous power by which he stands alone’(BL 180). But he cannot allow that this is what Wordsworthclaims for himself, in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, since it conflicts with his representation ofWordsworth’s imaginative genius.14 As Ariosto’s and Spencer’s characters act in their frenzied imaginations, and as Wordsworth representshimself doing in ‘Nutting’, as the mood of his mind shifts dramatically in the poem.50