This essay traces an epistemic shift occurring jointly in the late eighteenth-century sciences of sensation and in the literary aesthetics of early Romanticism. Taking as my point of departure Michel Foucault's remark that the history of modernity begins with a conception of the human being as a mutable physiological entity, my essay examines some ways in which Wordsworth's poetry registers this coeval emergence. I argue that the poet's celebrated account of the "infant babe" in Book 2 of The

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... elude reflects a newly understood conception of the sensorium as subject to historical change. Attending to the humanscientific contexts of Wordsworth's narrative, I make a further case for reading in this passage an historiographical investment in the senses and their periodization that connects such densely psychologized passages of the poem with its explicit critique of French sensationalist psychology in the same book. As I argue, Wordsworth's seemingly hermetic reflection on the infant babe can be seen as a purposeful reflection on the task of representing the periods of human perception. Such passages of Wordsworth's poetry thus represent an important anticipation of our own efforts to produce archaeologies of perception or to trace transformations of literary-aesthetic sensibilities over time. Few genres of historical research have been quite so productive these days as that genre known as affective history, and the sub-genre that often goes by the name of the history of the senses. This scholarship has been marked by an impressive diversity of interpretive framework (neo-Marxist, phenomenological, liberal-humanist, Foucauldian, feminist), disciplinary orientation (history, anthropology, art history, and literary studies), and historical object of analysis (literary and political discourse, the visual arts, optical, acoustical, and industrial technologies); consequently, perhaps only one general characteristic can be drawn from the history of the senses as a whole, so obvious as to escape much critical attention. It would, I think, be hard to deny that the Noel Jackson is an Associate Professor in the Literature Section at MIT. Correspondence to Noel Jackson,