Page:A New Zealand verse (1906).pdf/33

but only after trouble and careful searching for her; so he went feeling about along the banks of the hot spring, searching everywhere, while she lay coyly hid under the ledges of the rock, peeping out, wondering when she would be found. At last he caught hold of a hand, and cried out, ‘Hollo, who’s this?’ And Hinemoa answered, ‘It’s I, Tutanekai.’ And he said, ‘But who are you?— who’s I?’ Then she spoke louder, and said, ‘It’s I, ’tis Hinemoa.’ And he said, ‘Ho! ho! ho! Can such in very truth be the case? Let us two go then to my house.’ And she answered, ‘Yes’; and she rose up in the water as beautiful as the wild white hawk, and stepped upon the edge of the bath as graceful as the shy white crane; and he threw garments over her and took her, and they proceeded to his house, and reposed there; and thenceforth, according to the ancient laws of the Maori, they were man and wife.”

After the verse that sounds evident that local tone has been considered, there still remains that large division which cannot be bound down to the islands of New Zealand; and here our writers, coming out of the strongholds set apart for them to occupy, must measure themselves against the poets of all time. “Little songs for little birds,” and it would be unreasonable to expect from them anything very new, anything surpassingly noble, in dealing