Maori breeding went so far as to avoid in converse words or topics likely to be disagreeable to their hearers.
Their feeling for beauty was shown not merely in their art, but in selecting the sites of dwelling-places, and in a fondness for shady shrubs and trees about their huts and for the forest-flowers.

The natural images and similes so common in their wild, abrupt, unrhymed chants and songs showed how closely they watched and sympathised with nature.

The hoar-frost, which vanishes with the sunrise, stood with them for ephemeral fame.

Rank without power was "a fountain without water." The rushing stream reminded the Maori singer, as it did the Mantuan, of the remorseless current of life and human fate.
"But who can check life's stream?
Or turn its waters back?
'Tis past," cried a father mourning for his dead son.

In another lament a grieving mother is compared to the drooping fronds of the tree-fern.