I stay my haste, I make delays,
For what avails this eager pace? 
I stand amid the eternal ways,
And what is mine shall know my face,

Asleep, awake, by night or day,
The friends I seek are seeking me;
No wind can drive my bark astray,
Nor change the tide of destiny.

What matter if I stand alone? 
I wait with joy the coming years;
My heart shall reap where it has sown,
And garner up its fruit of tears.

The waters know their own, and draw
The brook that springs in yonder height;
So flows the good with equal law
Unto the soul of pure delight.

The stars come nightly to the sky;
The tidal wave unto the sea;
Nor time, nor space, nor deep, nor high,
Can keep my own away from me.

John Burroughs.

CHAPTER III.

VOLUME.

THE REVENGE.

A ballad of the fleet.

I.

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay,
And a pinnance, like a flutter’d bird, came flying from
     far away: 
“Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fifty-
     three!”
Then sware Lord Thomas Howard:  “’Fore God I am
     no coward;
But I cannot meet them here, for my ships are out of
     gear,
And the half my men are sick.  I must fly, but follow
     quick. 
We are six ships of the line; can we fight with fifty-
     three?”

II.

Then spake Sir Richard Grenville:  “I know you are
     no coward;
You fly them for a moment to fight with them again. 
But I’ve ninety men and more that are lying sick ashore. 
I should count myself the coward if I left them, Lord Howard,
To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain.”

III.

So Lord Howard past away with five ships of war that day,
Till he melted like a cloud in the silent summer heaven;
But Sir Richard bore in hand all his sick men from the land
Very carefully and slow,
Men of Bideford in Devon,
And we laid them on the ballast down below;
For we brought them all aboard,
And they blest him in their pain, that they were not
  left to Spain,
To the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord.

IV.

He had only a hundred seamen to work the ship and to fight,
And he sailed away from Flores till the Spaniard came in
  sight,
With his huge sea-castles heaving upon the weather bow. 
“Shall we fight or shall we fly? 
Good Sir Richard, tell us now,
For to fight is but to die! 
There’ll be little of us left by the time this