I. moss. 23 



taskmaster and Maker of Soldiers, as yet, the 

 strongest known among natural powers. The light- 

 ning 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 especially /^decaying 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 ob- 

 loquy 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, 



