size, it

is too small, not indeed for our respect, but for our comprehension, we magnify it, Fig. 2, C, and thereupon perceive it to be indeed composed of, a, the small fibrous root which sustains the plant; b, the leaf-surrounded stem which is the actual being, and main creature, moss; and, c, the aspirant pillar, and cap, of its fructification.

11. But there is one minor division yet. You see I have drawn the central part of the moss plant (b, Fig. 2,) half in outline and half in black; and that, similarly, in the upper group, which is too small to show the real roots, the base of the cluster is black. And you remember, I doubt not, how often in gathering what most invited gathering, of deep green, starry, perfectly soft and living wood-moss, you found it fall asunder in your hand into multitudes of separate threads, each with its bright green crest, and long root of blackness.

That blackness at the root—though only so notable in this wood-moss and collateral species, is indeed a general character of the mosses, with rare exceptions. It is their funeral blackness;—that, I perceive, is the way the moss leaves die. They do not fall—they do not visibly decay. But they decay invisibly, in continual secession, beneath the ascending crest. They rise to form that crest, all green and bright, and take the light and air from those out of which they grew;—and those, their ancestors, darken and die slowly, and at last become a mass of mouldering ground. In fact, as I perceive farther, their final duty is so to die. The main work of other leaves is

in their life,—but these have to form the earth out of which all other leaves are to grow. Not to cover the rocks with golden velvet only, but to fill their crannies with the dark earth, through which nobler creatures shall one day seek their being.

12. "Grant but as many sorts of mind as moss." Pope could not have known the hundredth part of the number of 'sorts' of moss there are; and I suppose he only chose the word because it was a monosyllable beginning with m, and the best English general expression for despised and minute structures of plants. But a fate rules the words of wise men, which makes their words truer, and worth more, than the men themselves know. No other plants have so endless variety on so similar a structure as the mosses; and none teach so well the humility of Death. As for the death of our bodies, we have learned, wisely, or unwisely, to look the fact of that in the face. But none of us, I think, yet care to look the fact of the death of our minds in the face. I do not mean death of our souls, but of our mental work. So far as it is good art, indeed, and done in realistic form, it may perhaps not die; but so far as it was only good thought—good, for its time, and apparently a great achievement therein—that good, useful thought may yet in the future become a foolish thought, and then die quite away,—it, and the memory of it,—when better thought and knowledge come. But the better thought could not have come if the weaker thought had not come first, and died in sustaining the

better. If we think honestly, our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish usefully—like the moss—and become dark, not without due service. But if we think dishonestly, or malignantly, our thoughts will die like evil fungi,—dripping corrupt dew.

13. But farther. If you have walked moorlands enough to know the look of them, you know well those flat spaces or causeways of bright green or golden ground between the heathy rock masses; which signify winding pools and inlets of stagnant water caught among the rocks;—pools which the deep moss that covers them—blanched, not black, at the root,—is slowly filling and making firm; whence generally the unsafe ground in the moorland gets known by being mossy instead of heathy; and is at last called by its riders, briefly, 'the Moss': and as it is mainly at these same mossy places that the riding is difficult, and brings out the gifts of horse and rider, and discomfits all followers not similarly gifted, the skilled crosser of them got his name, naturally, of 'moss-rider,' or moss-trooper. In which manner the moss of Norway and Scotland has been a taskmaster and Maker of Soldiers, as yet, the strongest known among natural powers. The lightning may kill a man, or cast down a tower, but these little tender leaves of moss—they and their progenitors—have trained the Northern Armies.

14. So much for the human meaning of that decay of the leaves. Now to go back to the little creatures themselves. It seems that the upper part of the moss fibre is

especially undecaying among leaves; and the lower part, especially decaying. That, in fact, a plant of moss-fibre is a kind of persistent state of what is, in other plants, annual. Watch the year's growth of any luxuriant flower. First it comes out of the ground all fresh and bright; then, as the higher leaves and branches shoot up, those first leaves near the ground get brown, sickly, earthy,—remain for ever degraded in the dust, and under the dashed slime in rain, staining, and grieving, and loading them with obloquy of envious earth, half-killing them,—only life enough left in them to hold on the stem, and to be guardians of the rest of the plant from all they suffer;—while, above them, the happier leaves, for whom they are thus oppressed, bend freely to the sunshine, and drink the rain pure.

The moss strengthens on a diminished scale, intensifies, and makes perpetual, these two states,—bright leaves above that never wither, leaves beneath that exist only to wither.

15. I have hitherto spoken only of the fading moss as it is needed for change into earth. But I am not sure whether a yet more important office, in its days of age, be not its use as a colour.

We are all thankful enough—as far as we ever are so—for green moss, and yellow moss. But we are never enough grateful for black moss. The golden would be nothing without it, nor even the grey.

It is true that there are black lichens enough, and

brown ones: nevertheless, the chief use of lichens is for silver and gold colour on rocks; and it is the dead moss which gives the leopard-like touches of black. And yet here again—as to a thing I have been looking at and painting all my life—I am brought to pause, the moment I think of it carefully. The black moss which gives the precious Velasquez touches, lies, much of it, flat on the rocks; radiating from its centres—powdering in the fingers, if one breaks it off, like dry tea. Is it a black species?—or a black-parched state of other species, perishing for the sake of Velasquez effects, instead of accumulation of earth? and, if so, does it die of drought, accidentally, or, in a sere old age, naturally? and how is it related to the rich green bosses that grow in deep velvet? And there again is another matter not clear to me. One calls them 'velvet' because they are all brought to an even surface at the top. Our own velvet is reduced to such trimness by cutting. But how is the moss trimmed? By what scissors? Carefullest Elizabethan gardener never shaped his yew hedge more daintily than the moss fairies smooth these soft rounded surfaces of green and gold. And just fancy the difference, if they were ragged! If the fibres had every one of them leave to grow at their own sweet will, and to be long or short as they liked, or, worse still, urged by fairy prizes into laboriously and agonizingly trying which could grow longest. Fancy the surface of a spot of competitive moss!

16. But how is it that they are subdued into that