Morphosis
Coleridge doesn’t mention Girolamo Fracastoro in his Notebooks , and he’s not in the Marginalia , but we know he read him—or we know now , because I tracked down the source of this poem which, it may be, Coleridge tried to pass off as his own in a September 1802 letter to William Sotheby .
In the Biographia Literaria (1818), Coleridge talks, inter alia ( inter multa alia ) about — though he doesn’t call it this — ‘ xenoglossy ’: that is, the ability manifested by some people to speak in a language other than their own, despite never having learned that other language. The story goes like this: a few years before Coleridge arrived in Germany (in 1798) there was, ‘in a Roman Catholic town’ in the north of the country, a minor cause célèbre.
Coleridge, on holiday in Ramsgate in 1823, saw (or heard) a bumblebee fly past his head, and wrote this in his notebook:
Morphosis