16 PROSEEPINA. 



the like. It is dry, since yesterday, and its fibres define them* 

 selves against the dark ground in warm green, touched with 

 a glittering light. Note that burnished lustre of the minute 

 leaves ; they are necessarily always relieved against dark hol- 

 lows, and this lustre makes them much clearer and brighter 

 than if they were of dead green. In that lustre and it ^is 

 characteristic of them they differ wholly from the dead, aloe- 

 like texture of the pineapple leaf ; and remind me, as I look at 

 them closely, a little of some conditions of chaff, as on heads 

 of wheat after being threshed. I will hunt down that clue 

 presently ; meantime there is something else to be noticed on 

 the old brick. 



8. Out of its emerald green cushions of minute leaves, there 

 rise, here and there, thin red threads, each with a little brown 

 cap, or something like a cap, at the top of it. These red 

 threads shooting up out of the green tufts, are, I believe, the 

 fructification of the moss ; fringing its surface in the woods, 

 and on the rocks, with the small forests of brown stems, each 

 carrying its pointed cap or crest of infinitely varied ' mode,' 

 as we shall see presently ; and, which is one of their most 

 blessed functions, carrying high the dew in the morning; 

 every spear balancing its own crystal globe. 



9. And now, with my own broken memories of moss, 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 stem descends a fibrous root, and ascends in its sea- 

 son, 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,* in its fruit 

 season, of its real size ; but at present I want to look at the 



* 'Dicranum cerviculatum,' sequel to Flora Danica, Tab. MMCCX. 



