Proserpina, Volume 1 | Page 7

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 {21} 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 {22} 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 {23} spherical
obedience, like a crystal of wavellite?[11] Strange--that the vegetable
creatures growing so fondly on rocks should form themselves in that
mineral-like manner. It is true that the tops of all well-grown trees are
rounded, on