I heard the bird singing a pleasant song. He sang of food; he also sang of love. The name of this bird is known to me, But I will not tell it till we meet under the moon.
The stranger, with his face so ugly and pale, Has come from far over the sea. He loves us, he says; but a Maori maid Will not listen to his love.
The mountains and vales of our own land Are pleasant to see and live among. And the sun at his setting is very red-- Red with love to the Maori; angry at the stranger.
My father lived here long ago; He lived here, and here also lived the paraipa (a kind of bird). The paraipa is not here, and my father is dead: Woe is me, I wander among strangers.
Mountains--The Lochaber Axe, Ancient and Modern.
"With occasional gales, by no means out of place or untimeous at this date [October 1873], with the sun already in its retrogression, almost half-way back through Scorpio, the weather is upon the whole mild and more autumn-like than was any portion of autumn proper itself. Winter, as yet, has hardly descended lower than the highest summits of our mountain ranges, and how beautiful in the golden after-glow, even at this season, are these same mountain peaks, impending over us like so many living presences! Tutelary divinities we sometimes fancy them, interested in all that belongs to the dwellers at their feet, with living hearts under their rocky ribs, loving us even as we love them, if we only knew it, and speaking to us in their own solemn and mysterious language, as at midnight, in our communings with the stars, we are startled now and again by the weird, inexplicable sighs and sounds, and deep-toned murmurings that seem to rise from glen and corry and frowning gorge--sounds of much meaning, doubtless, if one only knew the language, and could respond, as the sea seems to do, in the palpitation of its heaving waves, and the boom of its billows upon the beach. Pantheism and atheism are the very antithesis and antipodes of each other--errors both, just as blind credulity is the antithesis of stubborn unbelief--but, if forced to decide in favour of either, give us pantheism for choice, as the more poetical, at least, and pardonable error of the two; for the recognition of a Divine intelligence pervading and dwelling lovingly in all things is surely preferable to the cold and bloodless anti-creed that professes to have searched the universe for a God, but failed to find Him. For our own part, we have dwelt so long among the mountains, and within sight and sound of the sea, that we have learned to love them with a strange, undefinable affection, such as one bestows only on what is at once weird and mysterious, as well as intelligent and potent, and, upon the whole, beneficent and friendly. So impressed are we with this feeling at times, that we fear that, however weighty the advantages otherwise, a city life for us would now be irksome and unenjoyable, and anything like a lengthened sojourn in a mountainless land, far from the sight of ocean waves, well-nigh unendurable. There is some meaning, however wild and improbable it may seem at first sight, in the theory that accounts for the Egyptian pyramids as erected by a nomade people, who finally settled along the valley of the Nile, in remembrance of the mountains of their native land, and to serve instead of these mountains in making the astronomical observations for which the ancient Assyrians and Chaldeans were so famous. Be these things as they may, we dearly love the mountains by which our humble home is surrounded, whether basking in jubilant sunshine or wrapt in sorrowing cloud, whether robed in midsummer green, in autumnal purple, in brown and gold, or snow-covered and ice-bound to their base; what time the day is shortest, and the sun, almost shorn of his beams, shines but faint and far down at its farthest point of southern declination. It is recorded of Queen Mary, of sanguinary, or rather igneous memory, that so affected was she by the loss of Calais, that had been in the possession of England since the victory at Cressy under the gallant Edward III., upwards of two hundred years previously, that she declared in her last moments that, if her body was opened after death, the name of the lost city would be found written upon her heart; probably the nearest approach to anything like poetry to be found in any word or act of her dark and bigoted and wholly unhappy life. If such things were possible--and the ancients, at least, believed they were--we should be apt to say the same in our own case of the mountain ranges and sea views around us, with which we have held such intimate fellowship for upwards of twenty years.