Page:Rambles on the Golden Coast of New Zealand.djvu/134

102 of beauty which the painter has never dreamed of, and in which adventurous travellers have encamped. What a fool I was to waste my time around the southern lakes! This evidently is the point of departure of the seeker of the sublime in nature. I am very much disappointed that I did not know of these things before. I am amongst a grand people now—open-hearted, hospitable, spontaneous.”

Mr Falconer Larkworthy, Managing Director of the Bank of New Zealand in London, in a well-written pamphlet published in 1881, entitled “New Zealand Revisited,” dwells at some length upon the beauties of the scenery of the West Coast. Writing of his trip from Christchurch to Hokitika, he says:—“The Alps in the Middle Island, 400 miles in length, resemble the Swiss Alps only in name, as their slopes are clothed with luxuriant vegetation, often to the snow level, and their shapes have a picturesqueness and individuality of their own, owing to their crystalline formation as against the great conglomerate beds of the Miocene formation of portions of the Swiss Alps.

“The Otira Gorge, through which the road passes from the East to the West Coast over this Alpine range, forms a tract of the most enchanting scenery in the Colony, not to be equalled by anything of a similar kind I have yet seen in any part of the world.”