Proserpina, Volume 1 | Page 4

her, and didn't know how. So
all I could think of was to go half-way up the Aiguille de Varens, to
gather St. Bruno's lilies; and I made a great cluster of them, and put
wild roses all around them as I came down. I never saw anything so
lovely; and I thought to present this to her before dinner,--but when I
got down, she had gone away to Chamouni. My Fors always treated me

like that, in affairs of the heart.
I had begun my studies of Alpine botany just eighteen years before, in
1842, by 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!
* * * * *
{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.