A Leaf from a Fly-Book.

The king's road is a troublous summons calling day and day;
But my feet take the cocksfoot track—the easy vagrant way;
Beside the restless acres and the gold of noisy gorse,
The ripple lures its lover down the dazzle of its course.

It's speech is of the yellow reaches, rich with lurking joy;
The revel of the rapids, where gay life is death's decoy;
My heart is with the laughing lips; I follow up and down;
But follow not the king's white road toward the haste of town.

A foot, the wash of waders; and aloft, the haze-veiled blue,
The heart is needed nothing, so the cast fall clean and true.
O carol of the running reel, O flash of mottled back !
and who will take the king's white road, and who the cocksfoot track ?

page 60

The hour-glass fills with weather like a wine of slow content;
I throw the world behind me as a cartridge that is spent.
Then home by summer starlight bear my grass-cool, mottled load;
I quit pleasant cocksfood track; I take the king's white road.

—Seaforth Mackenzie, in "New Zealand Verse."

"The word o the Poet by whom the depths of the world are stirred,
The music that robes it in language beneath and beyond the word."

—Tennyson.