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Ye hills, above the plain, that rear
Your steep impervious barriers,
How bold in prospect ye appear,
With terraced heights and buttressed spurs,
Where mural ramparts tow'ring high
Appear like bulwarks of the sky!
Ye seem, like some baronial hold,
By towers flanked and bastions steep;
The fastness of some knight of old:
While round your moated ramparts tide,
And Pomahaka winding wide.
Upon a cloudless mourn, how fair
Appear your heights of hazy blue,
Whose sharp projections cut the air,
That seem like some rare woodcut view,
With its marked features prominent,
And hollows all in shadow blent!
But stern the view when vapour clouds
Hang brooding o'er thy summits hoar,
And snow-rack wraps in frozen shrouds
The rugged fastness of the boar,
Revealing in each dark'ning form
The progress of the rampart storm.
Time speedeth on, ye lofty hills,
And marks its ravage like a flood,
When teeming clouds the streams o'erfill
That furrow fields, and spoil the wood;
So rolling seasons leave their trace
In wrinkled brow and shrunken face.
Time speedeth on, ye lofty hills,
While ebbs and swells the human tide,
The father's place his offspring fills;
But in your seats ye still abide
A monument through changing time
Of nature's handiwork sublime.
Man, o'er your rugged spurs and slopes,
Ambitiously asserts a claim,
In fond indulgence of his hopes
To found himself a house and name:
But, while men's records rise and fall,
Ye witness still perpetual.
But he who marks his useful sphere,
And lays his talents out to soothe
His generation's evils here,
And spread abroad the cause of truth;
As lasting as your ramparts shall
Endure his bright memorial.
Observed a few miles from the plain they present a perpendicular wall-like appearance that is further sustained by an almost uniformity of height along a considerable part of the range.
Poems of the Heart, by Dugald Ferguson. p. 43
publisher George Horsburgh, George St, Dunedin, MDCCCXCVII (1897)
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Copyright A Rodger Dickson � 2008 - 2011
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