III.

Now the long splendours of the day were past;
The gorgeous tints of Eve subsiding fast;
The Western hill-tops touched with solemn rays;
Their slopes in chestnut-hued and chocolate haze
Thin-veiled, that melted downwards into gloom
Blue as the ripened plum's white-misted bloom:
While the reflected roseate richness steeping
The East, slunk fading up from lake and shore,
From mountains next, and last the sky, before
page 161 The purple gray of shadow upward creeping;
All the flushed sunset sobered into boding awe;—
When Miroa, coursing quick from side to side,
Tossing to any one she saw
A merry word her aim to hide—
With careful shew of carelessness—
Her anxious flutter anxious to repress—
Her object to seem objectless—
Came like a quivering flitter mouse,
Came darting through the gathering dusk to Amohia's house.
Bursting with news she longs yet fears to tell,
The darkling room she first examines well,
Lest any listener be lurking near;
Then whispers in that Maiden's ear,
How all day 'twixt her father and the priest
The close and covert converse ne'er had ceased;
Till they determined there should be dispatched
An embassy to Nápuhi's famous Chief
With offer to bestow her—Amo's hand
Upon his son Pomáre: how, in brief,
She for young Kárepa had watched,
Who to the mission was attached,
Waylaid him on the road and wormed
His secret from him—as she well knew how;—
He teased her with his love so often now!
But had not Kangapo with truth affirmed,
No match more advantageous could be planned
For her—none give her Sire such right to stand,
With unconstrained and equal brow
Proudly amid the proudest of the land?—
This was a marriage,—must she not confess
The priests would all conspire to bless;
page 162 Aye, raise to frenzy-pitch their rival tune
Of incantations to the Sun, the Moon,
The winds, and all the powers of Earth and Air,
To be propitious to the bridal pair?

Shocked—terrified—the Maiden heard
The tale with obvious truth averred;
She flushed and paled; her blood suspended,
All life seemed fading from her brain;
Then the hot current spirit-stirred,
Back from her strong heart rushed again,
And high she rose above her pain.
Her doubts, her hesitation ended,
This—this—she felt had sealed her doom:
O dread! to-morrow well she knew
Once more she might be made taboo:
And what could break that hideous chain!
The threatened fate she could evade
Only by flight—swift—secret—undelayed!
All the sheet-lightning that had played
In pointless passion round her soul so long,
Condensed by this compulsion strong,
Shot into arrowy purpose, clear against its gloom.

As through the land when some dread Earthquake thrills.
Shaking the hidden bases of the hills;
Their grating adamantine depths, beneath
The ponderous, unimaginable strain and stress,
Groan shuddering as in pangs of worldwide death;
While their long summits stretched against the sky
Rough-edged with trackless forests, to the eye
A double outline take (as when you press
The eyeball); and the beaten roads below
In yellow undulations roll and flow;
page 163 And in broad swamps the serried flax-blades lithe,
Convulsed and tortured, rattling, toss and writhe,
As through them sweeps the swift tremendous throe:
Beasts howling run, or trembling, stand and stare,
And birds, as the huge tree-tops swing and rock,
Plunge scared into the more reliable air:—
All Nature wrung with spasm, affrighted reels
Aghast, as if the heavy chariot-wheels
Of God in very truth were thundering by
In too intolerable majesty:—
Then he who for the first time feels the shock,
Unconscious of its source, unguessing whence
Comes flying o'er him, with oppressive sense
Of irresistible Omnipotence,
That boundless, strange, o'erwhelming influence,
At once remote and in his inmost heart—
Is troubled most, that, with his staggering start
All the convictions from his birth upgrown,
And customary confidence, o'erthrown,
In Earth's eternal steadfastness, are gone:
Even such a trouble smote in that wild hour
Our Maiden—such revulsion shook her soul,
As o'er her swept that sense of doom
And dire compulsion spurning her control!
All feelings that had been her life-long stay
Seemed from their deep foundations wrenched away;
No more could her convulsed, afflicted breast,
On childhood's loves or home-affections rest;
Her Being all upheaving seemed to be
Cast loose and drifting towards an unknown Sea;
Her heart's young world, uptorn—receding fast—
Far rolled the echoes of the fading Past;
She stood alone—herself her sole support at last,