The speaker describes a small, ordinary moment: standing at the last house, watching a duke leave an audience in a coach lined with velvet. It's a brief glimpse of real wealth and rank, seen in person rather than imagined.
The second stanza sets this against the speaker's reading. The "gold pages" in other books, with their glittering descriptions of grand lives, now seem like "nothing but talk." Having seen the velvet coach with their own eyes, the speaker finds that books about splendor feel thin and secondhand.
The tone is quiet and a little dry. The speaker doesn't seem awed or angry, just struck by the gap between what is written and what is seen. "The last house" suggests a place at the edge of things, so the speaker may be an outsider watching from the margins. The mood is restrained and observant, with a hint of wry disillusionment about words next to the real thing.