Near the end of the first volume of Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell establishes his theory of the geological imagination as a faculty capable of presencing the earth’s deep past as an object of study. Time is no obstacle to the geological imagination. Lyell writes that as the traveller may traverse the earth’s poles, so the imagination may unify, through the connective propensities of the mind, the apparently discontinuous occurrences of the past, “restoring” them to the individual’s memory bank and making them available to mental visitation. This motif of the geologist as a special agent of memory occurs in Lyell’s writing as early as 1827, in his review of Scrope’s Memoir on the Geology of Central France for The Quarterly Review. There he writes that the scenes of the past may be “restored in imagination” through the extension of the scientist’s thoughts into the past, resulting in the inclusion “within the compass of our rational existence, all the ages, even though they be myriads of years.” My paper will first tease out the implications of Lyell’s concept of the restorative imagination, and will then seek to situate his idea of this special recuperative faculty in relation to specific key texts of the English Romantic cannon. We know from Lyell’s letters to his father that he was an avid reader of Coleridge (and, by inference, most likely of Wordsworth). My paper will thus compare Lyell’s theory of the imaginative faculty to Coleridge’s, in the Biographia Literaria. Could Lyell’s restorative imagination be a development of Coleridge’s vital secondary imagination? I will read Lyell’s notion of the imaginative faculty capable of beholding the past against aspects of Wordsworth’s career-long effort to consider the retrievability of the past to the imagination. How does Lyell’s restorative imagination echo Wordsworth’s concepts of “spots of time,” or “recollection in tranquillity,” which so inflect his poetics? The object of my paper will be to briefly sketch the ties between Lyell’s geological imagination and two of Romanticism’s most prominent poetic thinkers on the thought-giving power of nature, and to thereby highlight heretofore unrecognized continuities between scientific and artistic literatures in the 19th century.