tion, or
terminating perhaps in a naked rock, that often rise close beside the
most sheltered spots of fertility and verdure.

If this brokenness and inequality of surface oppose difficulties in the
way of agricultural improvement, the variety and striking contrasts
thereby produced must be often at least highly picturesque; and all,
accordingly, who have visited New Zealand, agree in extolling the
mingled beauty and grandeur which are profusely spread over the more
favoured parts of the country, and are not altogether wanting even where
the general look of the coast is most desolate and uninviting.

The southern island, with the exception of a narrow strip along its
northern shore, appears to be, in its interior, a mere chaos of
mountains, and the region of perpetual winter; but even here, the
declivities that slope down towards the sea are clothed, in many places
to the water's edge, with gigantic and evergreen forests; and more
protected nooks occasionally present themselves, overspread with the
abundance of a teeming vegetation, and not to be surpassed in loveliness
by what the land has anywhere else to show. The bleakness of the western
coast of this southern island indeed does not arise so much from its
latitude as from the tempestuous north-west winds which seem so much to
prevail in this part of the world, and to the whole force of which it
is, from its position, exposed.

The interior and eastern side of the northern island owe their fertility
and their suitableness for the habitation of man principally to the
intervention of a considerable extent of land, much of which is
elevated, between them and the quarter from which these desolating gales
blow. The more westerly portion of it seems only to be inhabited in
places which are in a certain degree similarly defended by the
surrounding high grounds. In these, as well as in the more populous
districts to the east, the face of the country, generally speaking,
offers to the eye a spread of luxuriant verdure, the freshness of which
is preserved by continual depositions of moisture from the clouds that
are attracted by the mountains, so that its hue, even in the heat of
midsummer, is peculiarly vivid and lustrous.

Much of the land, both in the valleys and on the brows of the hills, is
covered by groves of majestic pine, which are nearly impervious, from
the thick underwood that has rushed up everywhere in the spaces between
the trees; and where there is no wood,