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 when it has sown,
      And gather up its fruit of tears.

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

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

JOHN BURROUGHS.

ODE TO A SKYLARK.

“Ode to a Skylark,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), is usually assigned to “grammar grades” of schools.  It is included here out of respect to a boy of eleven years who was more impressed with these lines than with any other lines in any poem: 

“Like a poet hidden,
In the light of thought
Singing songs unbidden
Till the world is wrought
To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.”

Hail to thee, blithe spirit—­
Bird thou never wert—­
That from heaven or near it
Pourest thy full heart
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art.

Higher still and higher
From the earth thou springest,
Like a cloud of fire;
The blue deep thou wingest,
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest.

      In the golden lightning
        Of the sunken sun,
      O’er which clouds are brightening,
        Thou dost float and run,
    Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.

      The pale purple even
        Melts around thy flight;
      Like a star of heaven,
        In the broad daylight
    Thou art unseen, but yet I hear thy shrill delight.

      All the earth and air
        With thy voice is loud,
      As, when night is bare,
        From one lonely cloud
    The moon rains out her beams, and heaven is overflowed.

      What thou art we know not;
        What is most like thee? 
      From rainbow-clouds there flow not
        Drops so bright to see
    As from thy presence showers a rain of melody:—­

      Like a poet hidden
        In the light of thought;
    Singing hymns unbidden,
        Till the world is wrought
    To sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not.

      Teach us, sprite or bird,
        What sweet thoughts are thine: 
      I have never heard
        Praise of love or wine
    That panted forth a flood of rapture so divine.

      Chorus hymeneal
        Or triumphal chaunt,
      Matched with thine, would be all
        But an empty vaunt—­
    A thing wherein we feel there is some hidden want.