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the sky.” The whole poem resembles a luxuriant forest, crowded with exuberant growths, vocal with the sound of bird and waterfall, and the main story meanders through it as carelessly and almost aimlessly as the two lovers thereof wander on their enchanted honeymoon. The richness and beauty of the poem were not slow to win recognition. Browning, who was the poet’s lifelong friend, and who alludes to him in his own “Waring” and “The Guardian Angel,” wrote of it as follows:—“I am sure it is a great and astonishing performance, of very varied beauty and power. I rank it under nothing—taken altogether—nothing that has appeared in my day and generation for subtle yet clear writing, about subjects of all others the most urgent for expression, and the least easy in treatment.” Nor was the praise of Tennyson less hearty:—“Intellectual subtlety, great power of delineating delicious scenery, imaginative fire—all these are there,” he wrote. Longfellow also sent his tribute.

No other New Zealand poet approximates in greatness to Domett; but in the work of natives who have come after him there are to be found, if less fertility of imagination and power of vivid painting, a stronger passion for New Zealand, and a feeling of closer kinship with her soil. Domett writes wholly from the point of view of a naturalized,