"And stole from stair to stair,
And stood by the rose-wreathed gate. Alas!
We loved, Sir—used to meet:
How sad and mad and bad it was—
But then, how it was sweet!"
They did not marry; and the clergyman shall have no further and no other "confession"—if he calls this one! It is the meaning of the man's life: that is all.
In Confessions, the story is done; the man is dying. In Love among the Ruins, we have almost the great moment itself. The lover, alone, is musing on the beauties and the hidden wonder of the landscape before him. Here, in this flat pastoral plain, lies buried all that remains of "a city great and gay," the country's very capital, where a powerful prince once held his court. There had been a "domed and daring palace," a wall with a hundred gates—its circuit made of marble, whereon twelve men might stand abreast. Now all is pasture-land:
"And such glory and perfection, see, of grass
Never was"
—as here,
"Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold."
Of the glories nothing is left but a single little turret. It was part of a tower once, a tower that "sprang sublime," whence the king and his minions and his dames used to watch the "burning ring" of the chariot-races. . . . This is twilight: the "quiet-coloured eve" smiles as it leaves the "many-tinkling fleece"; all is tranquillity, the slopes and rills melt into one grey . . . and he knows
"That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come."
That king looked out on every side at the splendid city, with its temples and colonnades,