I.

With merry laughter rang the air
And feminine soft voices sweet;
And acclamations here and there
Of loud delight at skill more rare,
Some happy hit or dexterous feat;
And little shrieks at failing luck,
The baffled aim, the striker struck;
As Aniohia on the ground
Amid her damsels, scarlet-crowned
With kowhai-flowers, a lively ring
Flaying at 'poi,' sent flying round
The ornamented ball o'erwound
And worked with vary-coloured threads,
And loosely hung with dangling string
Made fast above their rich-tressed heads—
Fast to a single lightsome yew,
One lone totára-tree that grew
Beneath the hillside rising high
Mid rocks and flowering shrubs. Hard by
A little summer-dwelling peeped
Deep-red, from foliage o'er it heaped
page 108 Deep-green and lustrous—trees that bore
In tiny flowers their promised store,
Large berries of autumnal gold.
Verandah-pillars, barge-boards broad,
And balcony and balustrade,
All rough and crusted with a load
Of carved adornment quaint and bold
Concentric fret or face grotesque
In rich red-ochred arabesque
Relieved with snow-white touches—she wed
Gaily against that glittering shade,
The thick karakas' varnished green.
This cheerful cot, when days were hot,
With its interior cool and clean,
Its floor, for fragrant orange-scent
With faint ta whiri-leaves besprent;
Its roof, and walls, so neatly lined,
Between pilasters white and red,
With tall pale yellow reeds close-laid
And delicately intertwined
And diamond-laced with sable braid
Of leaves supplied, when split and dyed,
By that thick-tufted parasite
Which with its fleshy blossom-bracts
The native as a fruit attracts
This cot was Amo's chief delight:
And now while yet the day was new,
And scarce the sun had dried the dew,
She and her handmaids sported there.
Quick hand and eye they each and all
Displayed, as, arms and shoulders bare
From side to side they whisked the ball:
Nor is much need our lay declare
page 109 How she, the Mistress-Maid, in face
And form superb, and waving grace
Of lithe elastic limb, whene'er
The more erratic ball she tossed
Or caught—or proud with easy air
Regained her balance seeming lost,
Outshone them all beyond compare.
But see! at once the game is stopped
Each mantle, in its ardor dropped,
Snatched quickly up, at once replaced:
In coy confusion, giggling haste,
Up start the girls of lower grade,
As in his sailor-garb arrayed,
Emerging from a neighbouring patch
Of pinky-tasselled milky maize,
A glimpse of Ranolf's form they catch,
And, pausing, he the game surveys.
But Amohia calmly rose
With courteous mien and gentle pride;
A moment's blush she could not hide,
Within her eyes a moment's light,
Upon their lids a tremor slight,
Alone lent import to the greeting
She gave to him whose image bright
Had left, since that first forest-meeting
Her busy fancy no repose.

The youth had come prepared to stay
With presents and persuasive speech
Results he feared that luckless day
Might lead to; for the violence shown
By his companions to atone:
page 110 The "Wailing Sea's" just ire appease,
And heal if such there were, the breach
Between his former friends and these.
But as they scaled the steep ascent
Up to the village rampart-pent,
With high embankments, ditches wide
And fighting-stages fortified;
And passed the crooked entrance made
Through double post and palisade
With crossing withies braced and tied,
The prudent Amo gave her guest
A hint to let the matter rest;
And then he learnt how she had laid
Injunction on her babbling maid
To hold her peace; and strange to tell
The girl had kept the secret well.

With blunt good-humoured haughtiness,
A sturdy, proud and easy air
Of sway unquestioned, frank no less,
Did Tangi-Moana declare
In briefest phrase how glad was he
The stranger at his place to see.
And then, the proffered food declined,
To pipes and parley he resigned
Himself, in sunshine while they basked;
And many things it sorely tasked
The hoary chief, the youthful friend,
To illustrate, or comprehend,
Attentive heard, acutely asked;
About the white man's home and land,
Why Ranolf left it, yet so young;
The tribes he knew—had dwelt among;
page 111 The seaward chiefs and what they planned;
Who were their-friends and foes—and most
The guns and powder they could boast,
And all the wealth at their command
From ships that trafficked on the coast.

II.

Their meeting over, Ranolf strolled
About the flat where gardens gay
Bright in the morning sunbeams lay,
With large-leaved roots and basking fruits
That lolled on beds weedfree and clean
As fairies had the gardeners been
Then with the younger folk, a few
By Amo led, and one or two
Most brisk or curious of the old,
Crossed, paddling slow a large canoe,
The gleaming Lake's unrippled floor
To woody Nongotáha's shore,
To wing the hours of sultrier heat
With converse in a cool retreat—
A hillside hollow, whose sun-parched
And slippery grass of golden hue,
Green, like the half-ripe orange, grew
Where feathery locust-trees o'erarched
A little plot, an airy spot
Their yellow-blossomed branches laid
In luxury of emerald shade.
There Ranolf flung him down, at rest,
With that expansion of the breast
Exultant—all that unreprest
Abandonment to glad emotion
So fair a clime, a life so free,
page 112 With health and strength and buoyancy
Of spirit in supreme degree—
And more than all, and all enhancing,
That blooming Child of wood and wild
With shadowy hair and radiant face,
That glossy glancing thing of grace
With eyes in liquid splendour dancing,
Or calm, as if from some high place
Of bliss above this earthly scene
Her soul looked forth with light serene
No time could quench, no sorrow dim—
Might well excite, excuse in him,
A careless castaway of Ocean.
Before him lay no water, say
A hollow Sky inverted—blue,
With flecks of sun-illumined flue,
And mountains bung in crystal air
With peaks above and peaks below
Responsive—every feature fair
Reversed, in that transparent glow
Deep mirrored; every ferny spur
Each puckered slope, and wrinkle sleek
That creased their glossy forest-fur,
Sure at the water's edge to meet
Its upward-running counterfeit,
Exact as roseate streak for streak
Some opened Venus-shell displays,
Bivalve with answering spots and rays.
Far round were seen, o'er thicket green,
By sandy shore, in darksome glen,
Cloud-jets of steam whose snowy gleam,
But that they moved not, you would deem
The smoke of ambushed riflemen;
page 113 But peaceful these, nor passed away
For wind or hot refulgent day:
White, bright, and still, o'er wild and wood,
Like new-alighted Sprites they stood,
Pure in the brilliant breathlessness;
For breathless seemed the earth and sky,
Real and reflected; none the less
Because at times there wandered by
Over the sun-bathed greenery
A soft air, lifting like a sigh
Some tree-fern's fan, as if in sleep
It stirred in the noon-stillness deep,
Then sank in drowsy trance profound—
That faint distress the only sign
Of life o'er all the glorious sweep
Of verdure streaming down the steep.
So hushed the deep noon-glow around,
So splendour-bathed that vault divine,
The atmosphere so subtle-clear
'Twas rapture but to breathe it!—well
Might these have made more sober, staid,
Or pensive souls a moment fear
To break the soft luxurious spell,
The dreamy charm that wrapt the scene—
With utterance, even the most serene.

III

But Life with too much force and heat
In these young hearts impetuous beat
For Silence; so the livelong day
The stream of converse grave or gay
From springs redundant flowed always.
page 114 Their superstitions, legends, lays,
Could endless disquisitions raise;
And our Adventurer, still inclining,
Though neither sad nor very serious,
To all that bore on Man's mysterious
Links with the Life there's no divining—
Learnt how for them, invisible throngs
Of Spirits roamed all visible Space:
All Nature was a human Face—
A Sybil with a thousand tongues
And teachings for their priests to trace,
Excite, evoke with charms and songs:
All Matter was all symbol—fraught
With Love and Hate—with Will and Thought:
Within a Man's own frame—without,
Above, below, and all about,
Nothing beyond his will that stirred,
His limbs in dreaming, beast or bird,
Insect or thing inanimate,
But 'twas oracular of Fate:
The wild bird's song, the wild dog's bark,
Were mystic omens, bright or dark;
A leaf could wave, a breeze could blow
Intelligence of weal or woe;
Let but the wind creep through your lifted hair,
Some God was present there;
And if a rainbow over spanned
A hostile band,
Already 'twas as good as crushed.—
And then their legends—once again
Recastings from the ancient mould;
Gods, demigods and heroes old
Of giant bulk and dwarfish brain.
page 115 Greek, Gothic, Polynesian—all
Primeval races on a train
Of like ideas, conceptions, fall;
Their supernatural Beings still
Are but themselves in ways and will;
And still the Superhuman race
Keeps with the human steady pace;
What Man would be—what Man has been,
Through magnifying medium seen
Still makes his God or Gods that grow
With his Soul's growth—its reflex show
By grand Imagination's glass
Dilated; its best thoughts—the mass
Of noblest feelings that exist—
Projected with expanding rays
Upon Eternity's dim haze,
Like Brocken Shadows on the mist.
And was it not so planned to give
Mankind a fit provocative,
At every stage from birth to age,
The best devised to speed the Soul
Towards Adoration's utmost goal?
To guide his infancy and youth,
Too weak to see the summits fair,
Up an ascending mountain-stair
To highest hidden peaks of Truth?
And so Religion's self endow
With that continuous life and glow
Discovery lends, though painful, slow;
That interest ever fresh and warm
Which Science boasts her greatest charm?
Though slow indeed Religion's rise
Even to a glimpse of purer skies;
page 116 Though foul and stagnant if you will
The fens and swamps that clog her still.

But here the legendary lore
The stamp of earliest ages bore;
The stories told were wild and rude,
Insipid mostly, pointless, crude:
The simple guile, the childish wile,
With savage deeds of blood and ire,
And treacheries dull for vengeance dire;
Gods, giants, men, all blood-imbrued.
Uncouth the wondrous feats rehearsed,
With lighter fancies interspersed:
Recounted frankly, best and worst,
Since none were met with sneer or scoff:
—How Maui fished these Isles up first,
And Kupé chipped the islets off;—
—How Tinirau—vain Chief I the same
Who broad transparent pools outlaid
Of water, which the mirrors made
Where he his beauteous shape surveyed,
Was yet of giant power to tame
The great Leviathan he kept,
A plaything and a pet, who came,
Obedient from his boundless home—
Through sinking hill and swirling trough
Of Ocean, black through snowy foam,
With ponderous swiftness crashing swept—
Whene'er he summoned him by name;
Or rolling over, at a sign
From him, would smash the level brine
Into great clouds of powdery spray,
With thunder-slaps heard miles away.
page 117 —How Pitaka would noose and draw
Out of Earth's bowels by main strength,
Out of his mountain-dungeon fell,
Like periwinkle from its shell,
The bulkiest time-worn Taniwha;
Undaunted by his tortuous length
Of notched and scaly back—his jaw
Wide-yawning, and obscenest maw
With bones and greenstone trinkets filled,
And weapons of his swallowed prey
Men, women, children, countless killed
By this, of ancient tale and lay
The wingless dragon—rather say
Iguanodon or Lizard vast,
Some caverned monster left the last
Memento of a world bygone
Earth's grinding changes had o'erthrown,
Downliving with still lessening powers
Into this foreign world of ours:
Then, too, how Márutúa drew
His dragnets round a hostile crew,
The thousand men he snared and slew—
Beguiled to feast upon the strand
And lend their seeming friend a hand
In some great fishing-bout he planned:—
How Hátu-pátu, as he lay
Couched in a rimu-tree one day,
Still as a tufted parasite,
A mere excrescence, not to fright
The birds that would close by alight,
Nor mark his lithe and bending spear
Along the branch more near and near
Creep slowly as a thing that grew,
page 118 Until with sudden thrust and true
The noiseless weapon pierced them through
Himself was quite unconscious too,
As thus he lay like one spell-bound,
What long-curved claws were slowly stealing round
The stem—or cautiously withdrew
Slowly retracted—then again protruded
Amid the leafy shadows playing
Upon the sunny-chequered trunk,
Noiseless as they and unbetraying
The lank and gaunt Witch-giantess
That wholly hid, behind it slunk;
Until he found himself, the watcher,
Grim-clutched, and not the poor fly-catcher;
Then in her cavern-home secluded
Was kept in cruel-kind duresse
To be as best he might, moreover,
That Patu-paere's pet and lover!

IV

And next, fair Amo's handmaid—she
Whose gaze of wondering curious glee
Would Ranolf's gestures, looks—pursue,
So pleasant seemed they, strange and new;
Who, if his lively, joyous glance
Alit upon the little maid,
Would start half-back, as if afraid
And half-disposed to run away,
With look averted though so gay,
And face half-hidden, and a play
Of giggling blushes, bright and shy;
Then with brown eyes—that all the day
Would else with mirth and mischief dance,
page 119 Keeping a sheltering friend close by,
Would snatch a serious look askance,
As quickly turned aside again
Lest she be caught in that assay;—
All with an artless sympathy,
An interest undisguised and plain—
Such fresh unconscious coquetry!
Though little noticed by the rest
Because with fancies of their own,
Thoughts, feelings hitherto unknown,
Too much amused and prepossest;
This shy and saucy Miroa told,
With fluttering breath, slight-heaving breast,
Looking at any but the guest
To whom her story was addrest
How merry Rona, reckless, bold,
Wetting one evening in a stream
The leaves to make her oven steam.
Cursed the fair innocent Moon aloud,
Because she hid behind a cloud,
And Rona when the light was gone,
Struck her foot against a stone;
And how the solemn Moon in anger came
Broadening and reddening down, and wound
Her bright entangling beams around
The affrighted Maid in vain resisting,
Like a vast Cuttlefish around her twisting
A hundred writhing trunks of chilly flame;
Then rose with basket, Maid and all,
And fixed them in her amber ball—"
And this is fact for certain—doubt who will,
Wait only till the Moon shall fill
Her horns—there's Rona with her basket still!"
page 120 "A pretty fancy, pretty one!"
Said Ranolf when the tale was done;
"Come here, my child—let me repay
Your story—it will suit your hair
This ribbon, though not half so gay,
So beauteous as the wreath you wear."
And as the laughing girls beside,
Caught, pushed her forward, held her there,
The ribbon round her head he tied,
For some such purpose brought; while she
A-tremble with delighted pride,
With pettish mock reproaches, aimed
At them, not him, seemed, half-ashamed,
Half-angry, struggling to get free.

V.

Then Amohia, tapping Ranolfs arm,
Said, "listen, Pákeha!"^*—and with lifted hand.
Rounding—Enchantress-wise,
When double soul she throws into a charm
The solemn archness of her great black eyes,
Deep lighted like a well,
An ancient legend she began to tell
Of one God-hero of the land,
Of which our faithful lay presents
Precisely the main incidents,
Diluting only here and there
The better its intent to reach,
The language, so condensed and bare,
Those clotted rudiments of speech:

page 121

"Maniwá -tanë! 'breath or life
Of Man'—no doubt; a race at strife
With Light!—were this a German tale,
Not artless Maori, who could fail
To hit its sense, extract its pith,
So pregnant, palpable a Myth!"
Thought Ranolf listening. "Darkness breeds
A swarm of superstitious creeds
That crush Man's Spirit till it bleeds;
His Father—God! yes, him they clearly
A terror make, a scarecrow merely—
High up—unmoved—dry bones or worse
To his abandoned Universe:
His Mother, Earth—her wealth—her worth—
Her schools—thrones—churches—mind and might—
Enslaved so long, set day and night
To warn and war against the Light,—
Free Thought, the beautiful, the bright!
Whose Sons not seldom from their eyes
Shut out, dissemble and disguise
page 124 Its full results—half-veil its rays
(Till they shall gather to a blaze?)
And fondly feign they nurse no seeds
Of death to all those narrow creeds:
Howe'er that be, the Sun will soar!
His foes may slumber, rave, or roar—
Yet Dayspring spreads o'er sea and shore—
And now, even now, for all their din,
The killing Light is streaming in!—
But I attend, Bright-Eyes, proceed;
Your Myth seems one who runs may read!"

• "Now, of heavenly birth to cheer him—beauteous from those blue dominions,
• Hapae came—divine—a damsel—floating down on steady pinions;
• Came, a moving moonbeam, nightly lit with Love his chamber brightly:
• Till that Spring-time of her bosom flushed out in a baby-blossom.
• Infant, it had infant's failings. These as once he eyed the bantling.
• Scornfully Tawháki jeered at Straightway all the mother mantling
• In her heart, her treasure Hapae caught up; to her plumy vesture
• Pressed it nestling; then up springing with reproachful look and gesture,
• Sailed off to her skiey mansion, vanished in the blue expansion,
• Like an Albatross that slides into the sunset,—whitely fading
• With its fixed rare-winking vans, away into the crimson shading.page 125
• Only ere she parted, while the lagging Westwind she invited
• Flapping her broad wings, a-tiptoe on the mannikin alighted
• (Red, with arms akimbo on Its knees, the gable-apex crowning)
• One advice she waved Tawháki, more with grief than anger frowning; '
• If you ever feel the Child and Mother to your heart grow dearer,
• Ever wish to follow and to find us, O unkindly sneerer,
• And would climb by tree-dropt trailers to the Sky a little nearer,
• O remember, leave the loose ones; only take and trust to surely
• Such as hung from loftiest treetops, root themselves in earth securely! '
• "Many a moon he mourned—Tawháki. Then he started to discover
• Where they grew, those happy creepers, that could help a hapless lover.
• Many a moon he roamed—Tawháki. And his heart was sore and weary
• When he found himself despondent in a forest grand and dreary;
• (Ah! that wildering wild wood—who can tell how dense it was and tangled!)
• Where in wanton woody ringlets many a rope of trailers dangled.
• Rapt, absorbed in her pursuit, a blind old
• Crone those creepers tended; Caught at, groped and felt for any that within her reach descended.page 126
• He, an ancestress discerning, ere for counsel he implored her,
• Touched her eyes, a charm repeating, and to sight at once restored her
• Then they found a creeper rooted, finely for his purpose suited.
• Up he went exultingly, bold-hearted, joyous-eyed, firm-footed
• At the treetop, see! a tiny spiderthread upshooting shiny,
• Wavering, viewless half, yet ever held aloft by mere endeavour!
• With a beating heart, Tawháki, muttering many an incantation—
• Wild with hope so high it takes the very hue of desperation,
• Clasps the clue so evanescent; then with yearnings deep, incessant,
• Seeing in the vault above him only Hapne's eyes that love him,
• Up and up, for ever upward mounts he dauntless—nothing scares him,
• Up through azure bright Abysses still that thread in triumph bears him!
• Suddenly a sunny grove is round him—cheery people working
• At a great Canoe, appear. All day he keeps the thicket, lurking,
• Till when balmy Shadow veils them and serenest Sleep assails them
• Stripping off his youthful glory, out he steals, an old Man hoary;
• Strikes a few swift strokes, and magic-like the work is ended—
• Graceful with its lofty stern, with open-circled fretwork splendid,
• Lo! the great Canoe completed! To his copse he then retreated;
• On another hollowed trunk next night the wonderwork repeated.page 127
• Those Celestials marvelled greatly; yet reflecting in their pleasure
• Such a worker were a treasure as a Slave beyond all measure,
• Watched and clutched that Old Man wilful—so decrepit yet so skilful,
• And to their great Ruler bore him.—O delight! who sits before him?
• 'Tis his beautiful benign One, 'tis his downy-plumed divine one,
• Hapae! will he now deride her or the subtle Elf beside her!—
• Kindly greeted, with caresses he the Child allures and presses
• To his heart no more to sever. Then, as he flings off for ever
• That disguise's dim defilement, Hapae smiles sweet recon-cilement;
• Swift, the Child they bathe, baptize it, lustral waters o'er it dashing;
• And Tawháki—breast and brow sublime insufferably flashing,
• Hid in lightnings, as he looks out from the thunder-cloven portals
• Of the sky—stands forth confest—a God and one of the Immortals!"

"More myth and deeper "—murmured he
As Amo rose and bid them wait
Her quick return: "But how translate
In German style the mystery?—
Shall Hapae our Urania be?
The 'meaning not the name' were she?—
And if Philosophy Divine
Whose radiant features wont to shine
With heavenly splendour, hopes so rare,
To Man's enfranchised Soul resign
page 128 Her charms celestial;—if their Child
Hight Science seem at first defiled
With taint its infancy may wear—
Materialism—foul Despair—
Shall he the wondrous birth despise?
Perhaps of those imperial ties
With Reason, free Enlightenment,
That marriage made in heaven, repent—
Until his fair Urania flies
Despondent to her native skies?
No, but from her he cannot sever—
Can ne'er resist the lofty lure
Of those aspiring eyes so pure!
His must she be, to forfeit never,
His hopeful, heavenly One for ever!
But where to seek the Angel flown?—
Can that dark forest overgrown
Be Metaphysics? And the crone
So watchworn, Kant or Hegel is't?
Some mighty Transcendentalist?
Or some serene Sensationist
With both his blinkers on? content,
Nay proud, with his old-fashioned bent
(Anile, perhaps?) to take and teach
Just what his eyes and hands can reach?—
Well! let the climber cling through all
To truths they call 'phenomenal,'
Well-rooted in the circle small
Of our perceptions; and ne'er doubt,
That, sown and springing from without,
These parasites upon the Tree
Of shadowy-leaved Humanity,
(Like those depending trailers, sprung
From floating seeds sky-dropt and flung
page 129 Upon the bark wherefrom they shoot
And reaching Earth take firmer root)—
These, even these, shall point the way,
The outlet find, some happy day,
By triple-plied deductions, say,
Or if by subtler clue it be,
Some thread of fine analogy,
To regions fair and fertile, where
Undimmed by dense refracting Sense,
Far in the Unapparent shine
Truths and assurances divine
Of God and deathless life confest,
Where the sad Wanderer sore distrest
May glad once more upon the breast
Of his regained Urania rest!—

"With yet more truth the legend teems.
Man's heaven's a heaven of Work it seems;
Vet though his matchless Art reduce
The World of Matter to his use;
Carve out that grand design, until
Its primal Force start forth compliant,
His Science-Lamp's good Genie-Giant,
Ardent to help him at his will,
Achieve whate'er that will may dare,
To walk the sea or ride the air—
Nay, though his potent patient skill
Work subtler witcheries, stranger still—
Take weeds and turn their downy fluff
To magic mirrors that retain
Whate'er impress of loveliness
May, flitting by, their surface stain;
Take light, and its fine rays unravel
page 130 Till they betray the inmost stuff
The stars are made of whence they travel;
Through continents and Ocean-caves
Whisper a lightning-language; yet
Not this alone his nature craves—
All these a loftier race may set
As tasks and triumphs fit for slaves
Who cannot Teach a nobler goal
Nor conquer truths that touch the Soul!

"All fancy this! invention pure;
That credulous complaisant whim
With its foregone conclusions trim
To which no Oracles are dim,
No doting prophecies obscure.
Myths may be construed many ways;
Things take a hundred shapes in haze;
In this world, like as Child and Mother,
Matter and Spirit ape each other,
Into each other shift and run—
(Both, better known, may turn out one)
And type and antitype around
In all things may be feigned or found.
Yet for all this, most true it is.
That savage story strangely rings
With echoes of profoundest things;
Glows with the old celestial yearning;
Nay glimmers with a faint discerning
How nought can stifle or repress
Man's upward tendency—the stress
Towards ampler Being, nothing less
Than high immortal Happiness."