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xxvi
Introduction.

the seasons, tales of the Maori,—her mana is woven into the complaints of the exiles, and in the best of it all, the national verse, the land and her people are hardly to be separated the one from the other.

From landscape to seascape is a short step: and in sea-poetry New Zealand may one day find renown. It is peopled by an island race, many of whom are never out of sight or sound of the waves; the salt winds blow all over it; “our cities face the sea”; already seafaring life is become hereditary in many families in the coastal towns; and our coasts are stern schools for fishermen. Therefore it is not a wild prediction that the sea-poems in this book are earnest of good things to come, in deep-sea chanties and poems of old sea-knowledge and of the lives of men who serve the ocean.

When other subjects of verse than landscape are considered, the opportunities are not less, but the performance is scarcely so creditable. The national game is football, and Maoriland breeds some of the best footballers in the world—but most football verse is journalese, and the only lines the editors have found which seem to catch “the game’s glory” are those which serve as envoy. New Zealanders are second to no nation in their love of horses; yet our best horse-poetry seems to drag when compared even with that of

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