Apart, however, from beautiful lines like this, and from many noble
passages of high reflection set to sonorous verse, this remarkable
poem is in its whole effect unique in impressive power, as a picture
of the advance of an elect and serious spirit from childhood and
school-time, through the ordeal of adolescence, through close contact
with stirring and enormous events, to that decisive stage when it has
found the 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,