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makes rainbows in the Otira Gorge and the moon rises red over the Plains.

This kind of writing, if never capable of being made into the very loftiest poetry, can yet rise to no mean heights. As far as mere word-painting goes, nothing has ever been done in Maoriland that surpasses Domett: some of his pictures of the Bush come as near to being great poetry as pure landscape can, and he is incomparably the greatest of the poets represented in the volume. He lived a strenuous life of almost thirty years in New Zealand, during which he occupied in succession most of the high administrative offices, including, in 1862-63, that of Premier. Domett had written two books of poetry before he came to New Zealand, and a third, Flotsam and Jetsam: Rhymes Old and New, was published several years after his leaving. But he is most a poet in the book he wrote in Maoriland—his South-Sea Day-Dream: Ranolf and Amohia. Through its five hundred pages, alternating with metaphysical soliloquies, Homeric conflicts, an idyll as beautiful as the second stanza of Don Juan, but truer, teem the most vivid descriptions of the New Zealand bush, and all the wildly beautiful scenery that lies around the hot lakes of the North Island. And every now and then one comes across such a line as “Windswept, a waft of sea-birds white went scattering up