His Books and Poems.

Opinions may differ as to the quality of statesmanship displayed by W. P. Reeves, but when we turn to his literary side there can be one view of his work by which he is chiefly remembered. In his poems he shows us the best of his nature; they reveal a sympathy and a depth and tenderness of feeling which seem strangely at variance with the often acidulated utterances of his political life. In his great book, “The Long White Cloud,” his descriptive history of New Zealand, his literary quality is at his highest. In “New Zealand,” a book beautifully illustrated in colour with many paintings by Frank and Walter Wright, of Auckland, he reveals himself as a landscape artist in words and as a wholehearted lover of all that makes the New Zealand scene, the noble mountains, the cool and fragrant forest, the glories of fiord and canyon and lake. He described colonial political progress in his “State Experiments in Australia and New Zealand,” published in 1902. But it is on two or three of his poems that his name and fame most securely rest.

“The Passing of the Forest” is a poem that has done more than any other work of pen or tongue to turn the people's attention to the need for saving the remnants of the New Zealand bush from destruction. It is a tangi for the vanished glory of the most lovely forest in the world, a glory that can still in part be saved by the joint efforts of State and people. With the forests there perish, too, the birds:

page 19

“Gone are the forest birds, arboreal things,
Eaters of honey, honey-sweet of song,
The tui, and the bellbird—he who sings
That brief, rich music we would fain prolong.
Gone the wood-pigeon's sudden whirr of wings;
The daring robin, all unused to wrong.
Wild, harmless hamadryad creatures, they
Lived with their trees, and died, and passed away.

“Gone are the forest tracks, where oft we rode
Under the silver fern fronds climbing slow,
In cool green tunnels, though fierce noontide glowed
And glittered on the tree-tops far below.
There, 'mid the stillness of the mountain road,
We just could hear the valley river flow,
Whose voice through many a windless summer day
Haunted the silent woods, now passed away.”

The ruined beauty “wasted in a night,” the blackened hills—the places where the waterfalls sprayed “dense plumes of fragile ferns, now scorched away”—these seemed to the poet a bitter price to pay for what the colonist calls progress.

The other most notable poem from the pen of a man who greatly loved the land from which, by a curious run of circumstances, he absented himself for nearly half his life, has long become a New Zealand school anthem:

“God girt her about with the surges
And winds of the masterless deep,
Whose tumult uprouses and urges
Quick billows to sparkle and leap.
He filled from the life of their motion
Her nostrils with breath of the sea,
And gave her afar in the ocean
A citadel free.”

The last two verses of “New Zealand” express the poet legislator's faith that this country's lawmaking will be a beacon to the less enlightened nations—

“A light as of wrongs at length righted.
Of hope to the world.”

Perhaps we are not all so confident as Mr. Reeves was that we are a bright and shining light to illumine the darkness of less progressive peoples. We are disposed to be more restrained in our opinion of ourselves. Nevertheless, Reeves' “New Zealand” remains as a noble poem, an anthem of the free. If he had written nothing more than “The Passing of the Forest” and “New Zealand” he would still have earned a very high place in the country's literature, for these poems breathe the truly national spirit.