we have from the poem called, The Prelude, which was published after his death.  It was designed to be only the opening and explanatory section of a philosophical poem, which was never completed.  Had it been published earlier it would have saved Wordsworth from the coldness and neglect he suffered at the hands of younger men like Shelley; it might even have made their work different from what it is.  It has made Wordsworth very clear to us now.

Wordsworth is that rarest thing amongst poets, a complete innovator.  He looked at things in a new way.  He found his subjects in new places; and he put them into a new poetic form.  At the turning point of his life, in his early manhood, he made one great discovery, had one great vision.  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.  Had he remained he would probably have gone with them to the guillotine.  As it was, the commands of his guardian brought him back to England, and he was forced to contemplate from a distance the struggle in which he burned to take an active part.  One is accustomed to think of Wordsworth as a mild old man, but such a picture if it is thrown back as a presentment of the Wordsworth of the nineties is a far way from the truth.  This darkly passionate man tortured himself with his longings and his horror.  War came and the prayers for victory in churches found him in his heart praying for defeat; then came the execution of the king; then the plot which slew the Gironde.  Before all this Wordsworth trembled as Hamlet did when he learned the ghost’s story.