sundered from it, though the hills may lie between, for they bear the memory of it “about in their hearts continually, as it were a new strength.”
No greater contrast can be imagined as one passes from the yellow eastern plains, with their purple setting of distance—where the glare of sun lies on far-reaching landscapes drawn in very simple lines, where the bare mountains show but a blue-black patch of native beech-wood—to this cool shadowy forest world, with its thousand varied forms in leaf and tree.
As I write of sunsets on shining waters, and pure snow peaks rising against a New Zealand sky:
“Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals.”
I hear again the tumbling river and the tuis calling: I smell again the mingled perfumes of the bush. I see the glacier pushing its frozen finger down even among the tree-ferns and the ratas; their splendid scarlet shines against the ice itself, and the high peaks glitter against the wondrous blue. The fresh, cold air is on my face of mornings when,
“I waited underneath the dawning hills.
Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy dark,
And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine. . . .
Far-off the torrent call’d me from the cleft:
Far up the solitary morning smote
The streaks of virgin snow.”
Those memories seem at times very like paradise. This coast I write of is a West Coast, and to a
