Proserpina, Volume 1 | Page 6

the dew in the morning; every spear balancing
its own crystal globe.
9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss {17} and this
unbroken, though unfinished, gift of the noble labour of other people,
the Flora Danica, I can generalize the idea of the precious little plant,
for myself, and for the reader.
All mosses, I believe, (with such exceptions and collateral groups as we
may afterwards discover, but they are not many,) that is to say, some
thousands of species, are, in their strength of existence, composed of
fibres surrounded by clusters of dry spinous leaves, set close to the
fibre they grow on. Out of this leafy stern descends a fibrous root, and
ascends in its season, a capped seed.
We must get this very clearly into our heads. Fig. 2, A, is a little tuft of
a common wood moss of Norway,[10] in its fruit season, of its real size;
but at present I want to look at the central fibre and its leaves accurately,
and understand that first.
10. Pulling it to pieces, we find it composed of seven little
company-keeping fibres, each of which, by itself, appears as in Fig. 2,
B: but as in this, its real size, it {18} 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 {19} 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 {20} 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