We say it is the result of a new way of looking at them, as though there were a particular virtue in our mental act, or we were better men than our fathers. But in this we partly deceive ourselves. We have little choice as to how we shall look at them; and might look at a billiard-ball a million different ways, or in as many moods, without adding to our knowledge. The truth is rather that the work of a great poet has from the first reserves of meaning and value to which almost no limit can be set. We may say ’tis because infinity, timelessness, and transcendence are of its very essence, making it inexhaustibly implicit; or because the incalculable intuition of the poet waives the accidents and amendments of common thinking and overleaps the slow process of experience to arrive at knowledge by the fiat of intelligence. Certain it is that the poet is always there in advance, waiting for the generations to come along and find him out a little further than has yet been done. But these reserves of meaning and value are not to be yielded up until the conditions for their effective appearance, for their proper play and functioning, have been instated. What history does, in relation to literature, is to instate these conditions. Then ensues, gradually or suddenly, our “new way of looking at the poet”—be it Homer or Dante, be it Shelley or Burns—which is but our recognition of the emergence of aspects, lineaments, virtues hitherto kept latent by the crowding of thoughts and prepossessions in us that could not co-exist with that particular way of perceiving the truth about these names, that particular compass of comprehension regarding them. The change may be more or less conscious and episodic, and may have a wider or narrower range. It may involve only an æsthetic difference, a difference in the sensations which the cultured of an age have in approaching a given poet; in the anticipative connotation or keying of the mind for that encounter. But also it may involve an entire re-reading of text and man; an intellectual reconstitution or re-orientation in which the Poet seems to be found afresh, or seen as it were for the first time—all prejudgments regarding him magically put away—in his proper being and loneliness _sub specie æternitatis_.