On Maori Legends.

Miss Mackay has taken some of the dramatic Maori traditions that appealed to her and made poems of them, one or two with the true flame and vigour of the war-god Tu, others with the lilting charm of a fairy-lorist. The tale of Rona has the truth and simplicity that you find in Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verse:—

“In the moon is Rona sitting Never to be free;
With the gourd she held in flitting, And the ngaio tree.”
Her fore-verse to the volume of poetry
that made her name contains two descriptive lines that haunt the memory
like a treasured tune, of long ago:—
“Land of the morning, Kiwa's golden daughter,
Land of the fleet-foot mist and singing water.”

In those two lines the singer captures the essential character of these lands in Kiwa's Great Ocean.