ABSTRACT
Despite occasional overlappings, it may be said that in the ancient poets (and, to a large extent, in their Renaissance imitators) there are certain immediately recognisable distinctions, which scarcely appear in Shakespeare's Sonnets, between different kinds of transience, or between different standpoints from which time and transience may be regarded, each of them appropriate to a particular kid of poetry, or poem, and to the drawing of a particular kind of moral. There is first a distinction between Devouring Time (Ovid's tempus edax rerum) and the brief span of time (Horace's vitae summa hrevis) allotted to human life, and there is a further clear distinction between the brevity of human life in general and the (as it were) yet briefer brevity of youth and beauty.
