"But you'll forgive me? Yes, you will forgive me, I know, when I am dead!

I would have loved you!-but words have scant mean

ing;

God loved you more instead!"

Then there is silence in the sunny garden,

Until with faltering tone,

She sobs, the while still clinging closer to him, "Forgive me-go-my own!"

So human love, and death by faith unshaken,
Mingle their glorious psalm,

Albeit low, until the passionate pleading
Is hushed in deepest calm.

"THE REVENGE."

A BALLAD OF THE FLEET.

At Flores in the Azores Sir Richard Grenville lay, And a pinnace, like a fluttered bird, came flying from far away;

"Spanish ships of war at sea! we have sighted fiftythree!"

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 fiftythree?"

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, my Lord Howard,

To these Inquisition dogs and the devildoms of Spain."

So Lord Howard passed 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.

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, let us know,

For to fight is but to die!

There'll be little of us left by the time this sun be

set."

And Sir Richard said again: "We be all good English

men.

Let us bang these dogs of Seville, the children of the

devil,

For I never turned my back upon Don or devil yet."

Sir Richard spoke and he laughed, and we roared a hurrah, and so

The little Revenge ran on sheer into the heart of the

foe,

With her hundred fighters on deck, and her ninety sick below;

For half of their fleet to the right and half to the left were seen,

And the little Revenge ran on through the long sealane between.

Thousands of their soldiers looked down from their decks and laughed,

Thousands of their seamen made mock at the mad little craft

Running on and on, till delayed

By their mountain-like San Philip, that, of fifteen hundred tons,

And up-shadowing high above us with her yawning tiers of guns,

Took the breath from our sails, and we stayed.

And while now the great San Philip hung above us

like a cloud

Whence the thunder-bolt will fall

Long and loud,

Four galleons drew away

From the Spanish fleet that day,

And two upon the larboard and two upon the starboard lay,

And the battle-thunder broke from them all.

But anon the great San Philip, she bethought herself and went,

Having that within her womb that had left her ill content;

And the rest they came aboard us, and they fought us hand to hand,

For a dozen times they came with their pikes and musqueteers,

And a dozen times we shook 'em off as a dog that shakes his ears

When he leaps from the water to the land.

And the sun went down, and the stars came out far over the summer sea,

But never a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.

Ship after ship, the whole night long, their high-built galleons came,

Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battlethunder and flame;

Ship after ship, the whole night long, drew back with her dead and her shame.

For some were sunk and many were shatter'd, and so could fight us no more

God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?

For he said, "Fight on! fight on!"
Though his vessel was all but a wreck;

And it chanced that, when half of the summer night

was gone,

With a grisly wound to be drest he had left the deck, But a bullet struck him that was dressing it suddenly

dead,

And himself he was wounded again in the side and the head,

And he said, "Fight on! fight on!"

And the night went down, and the sun smiled out far over the summer sea,

And the Spanish fleet with broken sides lay round us all in a ring;

But they dared not touch us again, for they feared that we still could sting;

So they watched what the end would be.
And we had not fought them in vain,

But in perilous plight were we,

Seeing forty of our poor hundred were slain,
And half of the rest of us maimed for life

In the crash of the cannonades and the desperate strife;

And the sick men down in the hold were most of them stark and cold,

And the pikes were all broken or bent, and the powder was all of it spent ;

And the masts and the rigging were lying over the

side;

But Sir Richard cried in his English pride,

"We have fought such a fight for a day and a night As may never be fought again!

We have won great glory, my men!

And a day less or more

At sea or ashore,