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.