Gold, of course.
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth’s returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.
The supreme value of love is a constantly recurring thought in the poems of our author. We shall meet it in its higher ranges in selections to come. Here we are still in the sphere of the mere earthly affection, with only the suggestion, in contrast with the transitoriness of earthly glory, of its indestructibility.
No explanation seems needed, excepting perhaps to call attention to this, that the “little turret” in stanza 4 is not a bartizan, but a staircase turret, or it could not “mark the basement, whence a tower in ancient time sprang sublime.”
Observe, in each stanza, the striking contrast between the former and the latter half, so balanced that the poem might be divided into fourteen single or six double stanzas.