THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. 
II 
we may see Mosses, and among them we may discern many 
shapes of rare beauty ; they form miniature forests at the feet 
of ancient trees, amid which the bronze beetles and other small 
insects sport, as do the elephants and other huge creatures 
amid the gigantic vegetation of tropical countries ; they clothe 
the bare rocks, and rugged boles, and rough park-palings, and 
ruinous buildings, with grace and beauty, and form a couch soft 
as velvet, and a path elastic to the tread, for pleasant rambles, 
and for needful rest, amid the woods and forests hoary. They 
hang with many-coloured tapestry the sides of spring grottoes 
and resounding caves, and cluster about crags and precipices, 
and float upon the waters like the locks of Nereids, swaying 
idly hither and thither as the current flows, or the eddy turns : 
“ For scarce my life with fancy played. 
Before I dream’d that pleasant dream, 
Still hither, thither, idly sway’d, 
Like those long mosses in the stream. 
So sings the lover in Tennyson’s ballad of the “ Miller s Daugh¬ 
ter," making use of a beautiful and natural image to express his 
own aimless and restless life, before it became steadied by the 
power of affection, and acquired a fixed aim and purpose. 
“The ferns loved the mountains, the mosses the moor. 
The ferns were the rich, and the mosses the poor.” 
So runs an old distich, and the legend says that formerly each 
of these plants kept to its own locality ; but the sun scorched 
the mosses, and dried the roots of the ferns, while the wind 
beat pitilessly upon both, and thus, by affliction, they were 
brought to a sense of their duty, and each agreed to help the 
other: so the tall ferns shielded the mosses from the sun, and 
the mosses protected the roots of the ferns from the wind, and 
kept them moist. A fine lesson is here of mutual dependence. 
From time immemorial it has been the custom to decorate 
the churches and houses at Christmas with wreaths and branches 
of evergreens ; and still at this festive season, when we meet to 
celebrate the birth of the Saviour of mankind, or to offer our 
devotions to the Most High, 
