PEAT 197 



vanish and the very mosses gleam through chill 

 coverlets of ice. Lovely beyond word or pigment to 

 declare are these same sphagna in full splendour. 

 Their manifold colours vary from white through all 

 shades of lemon and orange and purple on the one 

 hand, and into pearly greys and golden-greens on the 

 other. They mass and spread, and make rich back- 

 ground for the flower-jewels of the bog ; they hide 

 the fount of the spring, yet proclaim its presence from 

 far off; they do not haunt the peat cuttings alone, 

 but climb the hills, hang emeralds on their lofty fronts, 

 gleam under the showers of the mountains, and adorn 

 the very crests of them, rapt from man's sight and 

 hidden behind the grey mists. I think these uplifted 

 sphagna are often virgin in the lonely purity of the 

 hills, though one finds their fruits in sun-kissed, 

 sheltered bogs where heat dances in Summer. 



In the peat-tyes each atom of stagnant water flecked 

 with green is a world. Pluck a rush, and the gleam- 

 ing drop that falls therefrom may embrace within it 

 all the properties of a planet. Life flows abundant 

 there ; the crystal bursts with life ; and the life is 

 satisfied with its environment, being invincibly igno- 

 rant of the life beyond just as we know a little of 

 space but nothing of our neighbours in it, or our 

 relations with the greater creation and the universe. 



From the hillsides and the sheep-tracks on them, 

 and the lesser coney-tracks, that shall be marked 

 by skilled eyes in dim reticulations and networks 

 patted into the grass by countless soft paws, one may 



