A moment's silence and once more
Earth trembles to the monster's roar,
As, bursting from his den,

He cleaves high Tarawera Hill
To wreak his wild and evil will
On weak and sinful man!

Bursts Tarawera, Wahanga,
Bursts Ruawahia's height

Into flames that illume the night;
The earth, as in fits of anger,
Vomits, with terrible clangour,
Mud, and lava, and rocks,
While, answering to the shocks,
The heavens rebellow in might.

I see men wake from their sleeping
To praying and cursing and weeping!
O Heaven! the strong man falls,
Struck down in the throes of death;
The child to the mother calls,—
Poor mother! her last faint breath
Is spent in a fruitless prayer
For the son of her love and care!
The sire and the daughter he cherished,
The chief and the crouching slave;
The strong and the weak have perished,
And sleep in one common grave!

How sad was Rangiheua's fate
(Oft did he boast, with mien elate,-
Toll-taking at the Terrace gate-
Of all his wealth and power!)
On Puwai's Isle I saw him sleep
When hell broke from the placid deep;

For Ngatitoi lament and weep!-
All perished in that hour,

When tepid bath and terraced steep
Were whelmed in fiery shower!
Fell ruin wraps each dwelling-place
Of people of my tribe and race;
A hundred of my kinsmen die
In fear and mortal agony—

Some gulfed in waves that boil and hiss,
Some slain by bolts of living fire,
Some plunged into a dark abyss,
While some of terror's pangs expire!

I gaze upon a little hut

Where thickest fall the mud and rocks;
Within is one whose eyes are shut,
Who takes no note of earthquake shocks,
Nor seems to heed the fearful rain
That on the groaning roof-trees beats,
But something to himself repeats,
As one who wanders in his brain!

'Tis weirdly strange; but, as I look
On him who sits and clasps his book,
My own the form and features seem:
The hut is mine; yet am not I
Out 'neath the lurid burning sky?
Am I awake, or do I dream?

My mind is dark; I cannot say
If Fact or Fantasy held sway.
I fain would tell the wondrous lore
That Arawa's grey fathers told
To me on Reinga's awful shore:
All that shall be, and was before,
Was to my vision clear unrolled.

I live, the last of all my tribe,

And must not lock within my breast The things they gave me to describe.—

But leave me now, for I would rest.”

VI.

THE REST IN SILENCE.

TENDERLY we nursed Tuhotu,
But his soul seemed far away;
Earth no longer seemed to claim him,
Weaker grew he day by day,

Till his spirit bursts its prison,
And with features glorified,
As beholding some grand vision,
With a Christian's faith he died.
None of all his race or kindred
Raised the tangi's mournful cry;
In the green churchyard we laid him,
And his secrets with him lie!

Thus the last of the Tohungas
Perished, with his wondrous lore-

Passed away to join his fathers

On Te Reinga's blessed shore.

Still, at lovely Rotorua

Smiles the lake and shines the sun;

But from frowning Tarawera
Ever rise the vapours dun.

HENRY CLARENCE KENDALL.

[Henry Clarence Kendall, usually known simply as Henry Kendall, "the Poet of New South Wales," was born at Ulladulla, on the coast of that colony, in 1842. He is the one Australian poet known to fame, except his forerunner, Charles Harpur, who was actually born under the Southern Cross. His grandfather had been a missionary under the famous English chaplain, Samuel Marsden; and his father, Basil Kendall, who had a romantic and roving career in the "early days," finally made an attempt to settle down, and married a lady of Irish extraction, named Melinda M'Nally, whom he had seen for the first time on the preceding day. The first fruits of this strange union was a birth of twins, one of whom became the poet, Henry Kendall.

The childhood of the poet was entirely passed in the lonely bush around Ulladulla; and of methodical education he had little. Some part of his early youth was spent in a whalingship in the South Seas, but he made his first real start in life when he became clerk at sixteen years of age to a lawyer named Michael, a man of literary tastes, and himself a poet. It was poor Michael, who eventually drowned himself in the Clarence, who first inspired Henry Kendall "to build the lofty rhyme." His literary career began in the "Poet's Corner" of Sir Henry Parkes' journal, the Empire. Parkes was always a true friend to Kendall, who at this time made Charles Harpur's acquaintance. Like most Colonial rhymsters, poor Kendall was but ill appreciated by his more vigorous, less poetic fellowcolonists; so he sent a bundle of his MSS. to the London Athenæum, and to his own exceeding joy, and the great discomfiture of his local critics, three of the poems found a place in the columns of that acknowledged arbiter of the belles lettres. This encouraged him to correct his fugitive verses and publish Songs and Poems (1862), which he afterwards suppressed as "crude." He now found ready access to all the Colonial journals of Melbourne as well as Sydney. His subsequent volume, Leaves from an Australian Forest, is that on which his fame chiefly rests. To praise it afresh is superfluous, as its best pieces are already as familiar in Australia as anything of Tennyson or Wordsworth. Afterwards Kendall published Songs from the Mountains, which, however, showed no advance

on the earlier collection. He migrated to Melbourne, but returned to New South Wales, where he died on the Ist of August 1882, at Redfern, near Sydney. He was at the time Inspector of Forests, an official post which his friend, Sir Henry Parkes, had bestowed upon him. Henry Kendall married, in 1867, a daughter of Dr. Rutter of Woolloomooloo, Sydney, to whose affection and fidelity through a life of much hardship and sorrow he pays more than one touching poetical tribute.]

DEDICATION.

(To HIS WIFE.)

To her who, cast with me in trying days,
Stood in the place of health and power and praise;
Who, when I thought all light was out, became
A lamp of hope that put my fears to shame;
Who faced for love's sole sake the life austere
That waits upon the man of letters here!
Who, unawares, her deep affection showed
By many a touching little wifely mode;
Whose spirit, self-denying, dear, divine,
Its sorrows hid, so it might lessen mine.
To her, my bright, best friend, I dedicate
This book of songs-'twill help to compensate
For much neglect. The act, if not the rhyme,
Will touch her heart, and lead her to the time
Of trials past. That which is most intense
Within these leaves is of her influence;
And if aught here is sweetened with a tone
Sincere, like love, it came of love alone.

CLEONE.

SING her a song of the sun :

Fill it with tones of the stream,

Echoes of waters that run

Glad with the gladdening gleam.