In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force—
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.
There is not much of the descriptive in the poems of our author; he is
the poet, not of Nature, but of Human Nature; but when he does touch
landscape, as here, it is with the hand of a master.
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