sources of its strength, and is fully and finally prepared
to put its temper to the proof.

The three Books that describe the poet's residence in France have a
special and a striking value of their own. Their presentation of the
phases of good men's minds as the successive scenes of the Revolution
unfolded themselves has real historic interest. More than this, it
is an abiding lesson to brave men how to bear themselves in hours of
public stress. It portrays exactly that mixture of persevering faith
and hope with firm and reasoned judgment, with which I like to think
that Turgot, if he had lived, would have confronted the workings
of the Revolutionary power. Great masters in many kinds have been
inspired by the French Revolution. Human genius might seem to have
exhausted itself in the burning political passion of Burke, in the
glowing melodrama of fire and tears of Carlyle, Michelet, Hugo; but
the ninth, tenth, and eleventh Books of the _Prelude_, by their
strenuous simplicity, their deep truthfulness, their slowfooted and
inexorable transition from ardent hope to dark imaginations, sense of
woes to come, sorrow for human kind, and pain of heart, breathe the
very spirit of the great catastrophe. There is none of the ephemeral
glow of the political exhortation, none of the tiresome falsity of the
dithyramb in history. Wordsworth might well wish that some dramatic
tale, endued with livelier shapes and flinging out less guarded words,
might set forth the lessons of his experience. The material was
fitting. The story of these three Books has something of the severity,
the self-control, the inexorable necessity of classic tragedy, and
like classic tragedy it has a noble end. The dregs and sour sediment
that reaction from exaggerated hope is so apt to stir in poor natures
had no place here. The French Revolution made the one crisis in
Wordsworth's mental history, the one heavy assault on his continence
of soul, and when he emerged from it all his greatness remained to
him. After a long spell of depression, bewilderment, mortification,
and sore disappointment, the old faith in new shapes was given back.

"Nature's self,
By all varieties of human love
Assisted, led me back through opening day
To those sweet counsels between head and heart
Whence grew that genuine knowledge, fraught with peace,
Which, through the later sinkings of this cause,
Hath still upheld me and upholds me now."

It was six