Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/22

us also from taking heed of the patronage of the globe-trotter, the Hun by whom, for its sins, every young country is scourged.

No attempt has been made at chronological arrangement; not because there is not as much difference between some verse of 1850 and some of 1900 in New Zealand as in France, say, but because in connection with a place which is a whirlpool of active life, and yet at the same time a backwater of literary influences, dates would only mislead. Younger writers, for example, have imagined the emigrant spirit as truly as the men of the early days: the gap is not obvious, but it is forty years broad, between “The Old Year and the New” and “The Night-watch Song of the Charlotte Jane” on the one hand, and “Emigravit” and “For Love of Appin”—both the work of native-born women—on the other. Again, Broome, an amateur squatter, afterwards a colonial governor, was caught—only too surely—by the pre-Raphaelite mannerisms of the ’sixties; O’Regan, a lonely lad teaching school in a mining district and dying at twenty-one, a branch that might have grown full straight, felt the same wind blowing in the ’nineties.

As to the subjects treated of, the collection tries to be typical of the country only in so far as limitations of style will allow. It makes no pretence to be a guide-book in verse; a volume of