A number of years ago Norman Foerster wrote these words: “Tinlern Abbey is great aesthetically, as we have come increasingly to see; it is aesthetically vital but unsound; in sum, this poem is a superb expression of unwisdom.”1 The sentence reveals the sturdy dualism which might be expected from one who had studied under Irving Babbitt. Perhaps Tinlern Abbey is pronounced “unsound” because it expresses an almost monistic view of human nature: the poet's sensation, feeling, thought, moral awareness, and mystical insight seem to have developed one into the other without a struggle; the lower faculties are not sternly kept in their place by the higher; all commingle almost as equals in the powerful solvent of Wordsworth's memory. If on the one hand acts of kindness are traditionally praised as the best portion of a good man's life, and if mystical vision is acknowledged to possess an aspect more sublime, yet the balance is redressed when “nature and the language of the sense” are praised as the anchor of our purest thoughts, the guardian of our heart, and the soul of all our moral being. The poem is in many ways a romantic's “song of innocence” rather than a humanist's “song of experience.”