62 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



and terse ending of every alternate line, containing three to- five words, is 

 repeated,''' so making that line long and the next one very short. 



The Maori bards, in their natural imagery, occupied but a short time in 

 description ; often transitional it was generally done too rapidly to allow of 

 any detail. More frequently the particular and suitable natural simile was 

 merely seized, mentioned, or alluded to, together with one or two of its more 

 striking points, to be followed in quick succession by moving, natural ap- 

 pearances in preference to stationary ones : e.g., the setting of the sun, the 

 red evening sky, the twinkling of a star, the rising of the moon, the breaking 

 of the dawn, the glistening of the sunbeams, the sudden darkness, the rising 

 of the evening star, the passing of the night hours, the flashing lightning, 

 the hooting of the owl, the blowing of the summer breezes, the light flying 

 clouds, the flowing and the ebbing tides, the billowy sea, the noisy surges, 

 the falling rain, the flowing tears, the joyous seasons past, the various flying 

 birds, the gliding canoe, the moving branches of the forest, the waving of 

 the long leaves of the kowharawhara,-\ and of the shining plumy heads of the 

 graceful Arundo reeds, the thistle-down borne away by the winds, the raging 

 fire consuming the forests, the sulphm'-burning crater at White Island, the 

 running brooks, the swift currents both of river and of ocean, etc., etc. 

 And I think that it is in their proper and skilful use of those two great 

 poetical means — namely, simile and living moving nature — that they not only 

 excel, but show their fair claim to Ideality, and to rank as poets, for it is to 

 their excelling in those two particulars that our own great British poets owe 

 their justly-earned fame. 



We also often meet with this love of familiar natural imagery, and the 

 use of it as similes, in the oldest poets of various nations — as in Homer, 

 Hesiod, and Callimachus ; in Virgil and in Ovid ; in the Hebrew bards, and 

 also in their prose writers ; and, particularly, in the Scotch bard, Ossian. 

 Much of the common natural imagery embraced and used by Ossian is just 

 exactly what an old Maori loved to use, and used in his way too ! and some 

 of it we shall yet find in our few examples (infra). It was owing to this in 

 great measure, that the early translation (a.d. 1837-8) into Maori of the 

 Hebrew Psalms, and other Old Testament poetical pieces, found such universal 

 acceptance among the Maoris. There is a beautiful ancient passage by the 

 Son of Sirach, (though, perhaps, but little known,) — Ecclus. 50, 1-21, — 

 abounding in such natural and pleasing metaphors as the Maori poets 

 commonly used, and all, too, applied to one man ! as, the morning star, — 



* Some old Scotch songs that I have formerly seen are somewhat after this fashion, 

 as, for instance, in Burns' — " Ye Jacobites by name." 



t Astelia banksii. 



