Sights and Sounds Across the Southern Alps

The TranzAlpine train travels from Christ Church on the East Coast across the Southern Alps to Greymouth on the West Coast.  The train stopped mid way at Arthur's Pass and again for an hour at Greymouth for us to have lunch.  I enjoyed not having to drive. 

"Trees Need Not Walk the Earth"

Trees Need Not Walk the Earth

By David Rosenthal (1920)

Trees need not walk the earth 
For beauty or for bread; 
Beauty will come to them 
Where they stand. 
Here among the children of the sap
Is no pride of ancestry: 
A birch may wear no less the morning 
Than an oak. 
Here are no heirlooms 
Save those of loveliness,
In which each tree 
Is kingly in its heritage of grace. 
Here is but beauty’s wisdom 
In which all trees are wise. 
Trees need not walk the earth
For beauty or for bread; 
Beauty will come to them 
In the rainbow— 
The sunlight— 
And the lilac-haunted rain;
And bread will come to them 
As beauty came: 
In the rainbow— 
In the sunlight— 
In the rain

Clouds over Canterbury Plains

“So fine was the morning except for a streak of wind here and there that the sea and sky looked all one fabric, as if sails were stuck high up in the sky, or the clouds had dropped down into the sea.”

― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse    



Waimakariri River Gorge

That Evening Sun

 

  It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free    

By William Wordsworth      

     

It is a beauteous evening, calm and free,

The holy time is quiet as a Nun

Breathless with adoration; the broad sun

Is sinking down in its tranquility;

The gentleness of heaven broods o'er the Sea;

Listen! the mighty Being is awake,

And doth with his eternal motion make

A sound like thunder—everlastingly.

Dear child! dear Girl! that walkest with me here,

If thou appear untouched by solemn thought,

Thy nature is not therefore less divine:

Thou liest in Abraham's bosom all the year;

And worshipp'st at the Temple's inner shrine,

God being with thee when we know it not.