Proserpina, Volume 1 | Page 4

making a careful drawing of wood-sorrel at Chamouni; and bitterly sorry I am, now, that the work was interrupted. For I drew, then, very delicately; and should have made a pretty book if I could have got peace. Even yet, I can manage my point a little, and would far rather be making outlines of flowers, than writing; and I meant to have drawn every English and Scottish wild flower, like this cluster of bog heather opposite,[4]--back, and profile, and front. But 'Blackwood's {10} Magazine,' with its insults to Turner, dragged me into controversy; and I have not had, properly speaking, a day's peace since; so that in 1868 my botanical studies were advanced only as far as the reader will see in next chapter; and now, in 1874, must end altogether, I suppose, heavier thoughts and work coming fast on me. So that, finding among my notebooks, two or three, full of broken materials for the proposed work on flowers; and, thinking they may be useful even as fragments, I am going to publish them in their present state,--only let the reader note that while my other books endeavour, and claim, so far as they reach, to give trustworthy knowledge of their subjects, this one only shows how such knowledge may be obtained; and it is little more than a history of efforts and plans,--but of both, I believe, made in right methods.
One part of the book, however, will, I think, be found of permanent value. Mr. Burgess has engraved on wood, in reduced size, with consummate skill, some of the excellent old drawings in the Flora Danica, and has interpreted, and facsimile'd, some of his own and my drawings from nature, with a vigour and precision unsurpassed in woodcut illustration, which render these outlines the best exercises in black and white I have yet been able to {11} prepare for my drawing pupils. The larger engravings by Mr. Allen may also be used with advantage as copies for drawings with pen or sepia.
ROME, 10th May (my father's birthday).
I found the loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers. Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields, some day!
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{12}
CHAPTER I.
MOSS.
DENMARK HILL, 3rd November, 1868.
1. It is mortifying enough to write,--but I think thus much ought to be written,--concerning myself, as 'the author of Modern Painters.' In three months I shall be fifty years old: and I don't at this hour--ten o'clock in the morning of the two hundred and sixty-eighth day of my forty-ninth year--know what 'moss' is.
There is nothing I have more intended to know--some day or other. But the moss 'would always be there'; and then it was so beautiful, and so difficult to examine, that one could only do it in some quite separated time of happy leisure--which came not. I never was like to have less leisure than now, but I will know what moss is, if possible, forthwith.
2. To that end I read preparatorily, yesterday, what account I could find of it in all the botanical books in the house. Out of them all, I get this general notion of a moss,--that it has a fine fibrous root,--a stem surrounded with spirally set leaves,--and produces its fruit in a small case, under a cap. I fasten especially, however, on a {13} sentence of Louis Figuier's, about the particular species, Hypnum:--
"These mosses, which often form little islets of verdure at the feet of poplars and willows, are robust vegetable organisms, which do not decay."[5]
3. "Qui ne pourrissent point." What do they do with themselves, then?--it immediately occurs to me to ask. And, secondly,--If this immortality belongs to the Hypnum only?
It certainly does not, by any means: but, however modified or limited, this immortality is the first thing we ought to take note of in the mosses. They are, in some degree, what the "everlasting" is in flowers. Those minute green leaves of theirs do not decay, nor fall.
But how do they die, or how stop growing, then?--it is the first thing I want to know about them. And from all the books in the house, I can't as yet find out this. Meanwhile I will look at the leaves themselves.
4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf.
First, for the old brick: To think of the quantity of pleasure one has had in one's life from that emerald green velvet,--and yet that for the first time to-day I am verily going to look at it! Doing so, through