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 representation beautiful and noble in form, and true to the laws of their art.