By
the light of that vision and to communicate that discovery he wrote his
greatest work. By and by the vision faded, the world fell back into the
light of common day, his philosophy passed from discovery to acceptance,
and all unknown to him his pen fell into a common way of writing. The
faculty of reading which has added fuel to the fire of so many waning
inspirations was denied him. He was much too self-centred to lose
himself in the works of others. Only the shock of a change of
environment--a tour in Scotland, or abroad--shook him into his old
thrill of imagination, so that a few fine things fitfully illumine the
enormous and dreary bulk of his later work. If we lost all but the
_Lyrical Ballads_, the poems of 1804, and the _Prelude_, and the
_Excursion_, Wordsworth's position as a poet would be no lower than it
is now, and he would be more readily accepted by those who still find
themselves uncertain about him.
The determining factor in his career was the French Revolution--that
great movement which besides re-making France and Europe, made our very
modes of thinking anew. While an undergraduate in Cambridge Wordsworth
made several vacation visits to France. The first peaceful phase of the
Revolution was at its height; France and the assembly were dominated by
the little group of revolutionary orators who took their name from the
south-western province from which most of them came, and with this
group--the Girondists--Wordsworth threw in his lot.
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