That will depend, not on feelings which belong to
the temporary elements of the passing day, but on how far the eternal
and unchanging elements of art appear in their work. The things which
fitted the poetry of Tennyson to the years between 1840 and 1870 have
already passed away; the things which, as I have explained, fitted the
poetry of Browning to the tendencies of the years after 1870 will also
disappear, and are already disappearing. Indeed, the excessive
transiency of nearly all the interests of cultivated society during the
last ten years is that in them which most deeply impresses any man who
sits somewhat apart from them. And, at any rate, none of these merely
contemporary elements, which often seem to men the most important, will
count a hundred years hence in the estimate of the poetry either of
Tennyson or Browning. They will be of historical interest, and no more.
Matters in their poetry, now the subjects of warm discussion among their
critics, will be laid aside as materials for judgment; and justly, for
they are of quite impermanent value.

Whenever, then, we try to judge them as poets, we must do our best to
discharge these temporary things, and consider their poetry as it will
seem a hundred years hence to men who will think seriously and feel
sensitively, even passionately, towards great and noble Matter of
imaginative thought and emotion concerning human life and the natural
world, and towards lovely creation of such matter into Form. Their
judgment will be made apart from the natural prejudices that arise from
contemporary movements. They will not be wiser in their judgment of
their own poets than we are about ours, but they will be wiser in their
judgment of our poets, because, though they will have their own
prejudices, they will not have ours. Moreover, the long, growing, and
incessantly corrected judgment of those best fitted to feel what is most
beautiful in shaping and most enduring in thought and feeling
penetrated and made infinite by imagination, will, by that time, have
separated the permanent from the impermanent in the work of Browning and
Tennyson.

That judgment will partly depend on the answers, slowly, as it were
unconsciously, given by the world to two questions. First, how far does
their poetry represent truly and passionately what is natural and most
widely felt in loving human nature, whether terrible or joyful, simple
or complex, tragic or humorous? Secondly, how far is the repr