18 PROSERPINA. 



all other leaves are to grow. Not to cover the roclis 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 

 rnen themselves know. No other plants have so endless vari- 

 ety 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, use- 

 ful 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 better. If we think honestly, 

 our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish use- 

 fully like the moss and become dark, not without due ser- 

 vice. But if we think 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 mowy 

 instead of heathy, and is at last called by its riders, briefly, 



