Shortly after leaving the University, in November, 1791, Wordsworth returned to France, remaining there until December of the following year. During this period he was completely won over to the principles of the revolution. The later reaction from these principles constituted the one moral struggle of his life.
In 1793 his first work appeared before the public--two poems, entitled _The Evening Walk_ and _Descriptive Sketches_. Coleridge, who read these pieces at Cambridge, divined that they announced the emergence of an original poetical genius above the horizon. Readers of the poems to-day, who are wise after the event, could scarcely divine as much. At about this period Wordsworth received a bequest of 900 pounds from Raisley Calvert, which enabled him and his sister Dorothy to take a small cottage at Racedown in Dorsetshire. Here he wrote a number of poems in which he worked off the ferment of his revolutionary ideas. These ideas can scarcely be said to have troubled him much in later years.
An important incident in his life, hardly second in importance to the stimulating companionship of his sister, was his meeting with Coleridge, which occurred probably towards the close of 1795. Coleridge, who was but little younger than Wordsworth, had the more richly equipped, if not the more richly endowed, mind. He was living at Nether Stowey, and in order to benefit by the stimulus which such a friendship offered, the Wordsworth's moved to Alfoxden, three miles away from Stowey (July, 1797). It was during a walking expedition to the Quantock Hills in November of that year that the poem of _The Ancient Mariner_ was planned. It was intended that the poem should be a joint production, but Wordsworth's contribution was confined to the suggestion of a few details merely, and some scattered lines which are indicated in the notes to that poem. Their poetic theories were soon to take definite shape in the publication of the famous _Lyrical Ballads_ (September, 1798), to which Coleridge contributed _The Ancient Mariner_, and Wordsworth some characteristic lyrical, reflective, and narrative poems. The excessive simplicity and alleged triviality of some of these poems long continued to give offence to the conservative lovers of poetry. Even to-day we feel that Wordsworth was sometimes the victim of his own theories.