A child is he of heavenly stock,
Like the darling of Hitu-kolo,
10 First womb-fruit born to love's rainbow.
A bath for this child of heaven's breast,
This mystical royal offspring,
Who ranks with the heavenly peers,
This tender bud of Liliha,
15 This atom, this parcel, this flame,
In the line Kuhi-hewa of Lola--
Ka-lola, who mothered a babe prodigious,
For glory and splendor renowned,
A scion most comely from heaven,
20 The finest down of the new-grown plume,
From bird whose moult floats to heaven,
Prime of the soaring birds of Pokahi,
The prince, heaven-flower of the island,
Ancestral sire of Ke-oua,
25 And of King Kui-apo-iwa.

[Page 82]

The heaping up of adulations, of which this mele is a capital
instance, was not peculiar to Hawaiian poetry. The Roman
Senate bestowed divinity on its emperors by vote; the
Hawaiian bard laureate, careering on his Pegasus, thought to
accomplish the same end by piling Ossa on Pelion with
high-flown phrases; and every loyal subject added his
contribution to the cairn that grew heavenward.

In Hawaii, as elsewhere, the times of royal debasement, of
aristocratic degeneracy, of doubtful or disrupted succession,
have always been the times of loudest poetic insistence on
birth-rank and the occasion for the most frenzied utterance
of high-sounding titles. This is a disease that has grown
with the decay of monarchy.

Applying this criterion to the mele above given, it may be
judged to be by no means a product wholly of the archaic
period. While certain parts, say from the first to the tenth
verses, inclusive, bear the mark of antiquity, the other
parts do not ring clear. It seems as if some poet of
comparatively modern times had revamped an old mele to suit
his own ends. Of this last part two verses were so glaringly
an interpolation that they were expunged from the text.

The effort to translate into pure Anglo-Saxon this vehement
outpour of high-colored phrases has made heavy d