The gates of a minster old and vast;
And a king to his crowning-place was led,
Through a sculptured line of the warrior-dead.
I saw, far gleaming, the long array
Of trophies, on those high tombs that lay,
And the colour’d light, that wrapp’d them all,
Rich, deep, and sad, as a royal pall.
But a lowlier grave soon won mine eye
Away from th’ ancestral pageantry—
A grave by the lordly minster’s gate,