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Can, nal, li, èh, ne-was-tu.

A friend you resemble.

Chorus—Yai, ne, noo, way. E, noo, way, hā.

Ti, nai, tau, nā, cla, ne-was-tu.

Brothers I think we are.

And the chorus, as before. Now even the humblest student of poetry can sift all this evidence, on the face of it equally valuable throughout, and find that a part of it is worse than worthless, while another part is of real value; in many cases, however, the task is difficult, and this for two reasons. Either the missionaries, explorers, travellers, give only a partial account, or again, they give accounts of a misleading sort, if not actually untrue. For the former case, we may take Ellis and his description of a New Zealand dance.^[37] “Several of their public dances seemed immoral in their tendency; but in general they were distinguished by the violent gestures and deafening vociferations of the performers.” And that is all. It is enough for the purposes of the book, but it is not enough for the student of poetry. Worse yet is the tendency to state savage thought, savage habits, in terms of civilization, and so give a notion never true and often false. When, for example, one is told^[38] that in the South Sea islands there are poets who retire at certain seasons from the world in order to live in solitude and compose their poems, one is surprised at this notion of poetical composition among races where the great mass of evidence is for improvised songs of a line or two, with eternal chorus—savage pattern everywhere—and with accompanying dance. However, here is the evidence, and it must be taken with the rest. Presently comes an actual song,^[39] a pensive song, by one of these bards and akin to the Osage outburst translated by Dr. Mitchill:—