The maiden keeping tryst bids the light fleecy cloudlets, which in New Zealand so often scud across the sky before the sea-wind, to be messengers to her laggard gallant.
"The sun grows dim and hastes away As a woman from the scene of battle," says the lament for a dead chief.[1] The very names given to hills, lakes, and rivers will be witnesses in future days of the poetic instinct of the Maori--perhaps the last destined to remain in his land.

Such names are the expressive Wai-orongo-mai (Hear me, ye waters!); Puke-aruhe (ferny hill); Wai-rarapa (glittering water); Maunga-tapu (sacred mount); Ao-rere (flying cloud).

Last, but not least, there is the lordly Ao-rangi (Cloud in the heavens), over which we have plastered the plain and practical "Mount Cook." [Footnote 1: The Maori is deeply imbued with the poetry of the woods.
His commonest phraseology shows it.

'The month when the pohutu-kawa flowers'; 'the season when the kowhai is in bloom'; so he punctuates time.

And the years that are gone he softly names' dead leaves!'-- HAY, _Brighter Britain_.] Many of the Maori chiefs were, and some even now are, masterly rhetoricians.