There is much that William Wordsworth does not have in common with George W. Bush, American President (2001-2009). Here is just one: Wordsworth, in political context, is remarkably chaste in his use of word terror. Recalling his visit to fierce metropolis of Paris in 1793, just after September Massacres, Wordsworth resorts (in climactic tenth book of The Prelude) to a relatively sober vocabulary of fear and dread. (1) is invoked, but only as emotion felt by foreigners invading France who had shrunk from sight of their own task, and fled/ In (10: 1920). The young republic here inspires terror in its enemies, which is more or less in line with self-descriptions of French themselves, and indeed of Robespierre faction, for whom terror outward companion of virtue. The 1850 text mentions that after Robespierre's downfall Terror had ceased (11: 2), but that is total of Wordsworth's use of word in his most densely attentive account of events leading up to and including occupying months between August, 1793, and July, 1794. Robespierre's violence is attributed not to innate evil but to clumsy desperation (1805, 10: 546). Unlike Francois Furet and his followers, Wordsworth does not suggest that is a culmination of necessary logic of Revolution, and thus sinister truth behind its claim to democratic ideals, but rather a deviation from a trajectory established in 1789 and restored to its direction after fall of Montagne. He thus delivers a strong endorsement of philosophical Enlightenment as core of revolution, a view recently endorsed once again by Jonathan Israel. (2) In this view is not only not product of inner logic of 1789 but also an absolute deviation from it; its populist (and hypocritical) claim to enact will of people involved an anti-intellectualism entirely at odds with Wordsworthian (and rationalist) faith in the virtue of one mind (10: 179) as able in principle to provide a solid birthright to state along lines devised by ancient lawgivers (10: 186, 188). It is important to notice these carefully modulated judgments because Wordsworth is, of course, on popular record as something of a turncoat on these matters. But his core position here is that did not turn him against Revolution; that would come later, with invasion of Switzerland rise of Napoleon. Wordsworth is here distancing himself, retrospectively, of course, from patriotic hysteria of mid-1790s. If he were committed to a faith in a single paramount mind to come, whoever that might be, as best hope for setting French politics in positive directions, he is not in business--yet--of demonizing Robespierre. He is rather more in business, in fact, of demonizing William Pitt, thereby adding his voice to those who found Britain significantly responsible for bringing on in France. (3) And it is entirely characteristic of this most self-conscious of writers that he would understand and confess to mediated nature of his responses to events that he did not, after all, witness himself. Recall that, at sight of drowned man of Esthwaite, poet invokes power of books, shining streams/ Of fairyland, forests of romance (5: 476-77), as what protected him from trauma, whether immediate or recollected. Reading about something prepared him for sight of death and softened its effects--one of Rousseau's arguments against literature. (4) So too in Paris, in 1792, poet avers that whatever he felt of immediate dread, something more and perhaps something other was conjured up from tragic fictions/ And mournful calendars of true history (10: 66-68). He had, in other words, been reading about it, and that reading influenced his feelings to point that he could not say what portion of them (if any) might have derived from his own punctual experience. …