Page:The empire and the century.djvu/505



Italy and Sicily lying out in mid-Atlantic; give them a cooler midsummer and a scanty Anglo-Saxon population; indent the long, boot-shaped outline of their coasts deeply here and there with gulfs and fiords; banish beggary, ignorance, malaria, and the sirocco, but deprive them also of the glories and colour of history, architecture, painting, sculpture, and Latin speech and taste, and you may conceive of a country not unlike New Zealand. The ocean archipelago has the same slim shape, the same long spinal mountain chains, the same contrast between Alpine snows towards one extremity and high volcanic cones towards the other; and the brilliant New Zealand atmosphere and blue seas are Italian also, though in colouring and shape the lofty shores more resemble parts of Greece. To the landscape artist they seem almost too romantic a theatre for the sober, matter-of-fact British colonists, who are planting and ploughing plains, hewing farms out of forests, and turning silent valleys into green dairy pastures, and bleak hillsides into sheep-walks. For the Anglo-Saxon settler is a man of business; Romance does not trouble him. When natural beauty stands in the way of settlement it has to go; and the artistic mind must comfort itself as best it can with the reflection that much of the peculiar beauty of New Zealand is indestructible, and that some more of it will be saved for the prosaic reason that it does not 'pay' to destroy it. 462