Foreshortened in the tract of time. We are not directly conscious of their date, except that they belong generally to the Victorian era, or of their relative distance from each other and from ourselves. This is the fate of all true poetry as it ceases to be the poetry of an age and comes to be poetry for all time. If poems cannot survive this change by their innate vitality, nothing will really give them new life. If they do not first arrest and interest us by their own self-contained potency, no note, or comment, or Introduction will render them genuinely interesting.