e loveliest blue asphodel I ever saw in my life, yesterday, in
the fields beyond Monte Mario,--a spire two feet high, of more than two
hundred stars, the stalks of them all deep blue, as well as the flowers.
Heaven send all honest people the gathering of the like, in Elysian fields,
some day!

* * * * *

{12}

CHAPTER I.

MOSS.

DENMARK HILL, _3rd November, 1868._

1. It is mortifying enough to write,--but I think thus much ought to be
written,--concerning myself, as 'the author of Modern Painters.' In three
months I shall be fifty years old: and I don't at this hour--ten o'clock in
the morning of the two hundred and sixty-eighth day of my forty-ninth
year--know what 'moss' is.

There is nothing I have more _intended_ to know--some day or other. But the
moss 'would always be there'; and then it was so beautiful, and so
difficult to examine, that one could only do it in some quite separated
time of happy leisure--which came not. I never was like to have less
leisure than now, but I _will_ know what moss is, if possible, forthwith.

2. To that end I read preparatorily, yesterday, what account I could find
of it in all the botanical books in the house. Out of them all, I get this
general notion of a moss,--that it has a fine fibrous root,--a stem
surrounded with spirally set leaves,--and produces its fruit in a small
case, under a cap. I fasten especially, however, on a {13} sentence of
Louis Figuier's, about the particular species, Hypnum:--

"These mosses, which often form little islets of verdure at the feet of
poplars and willows, are robust vegetable organisms, which do not
decay."[5]

3. "Qui ne pourrissent point." What do they do with themselves, then?--it
immediately occurs to me to ask. And, secondly,--If this immortality
belongs to the Hypnum only?

It certainly does not, by any means: but, however modified or limited, this
immortality is the first thing we ought to take note of in the mosses. They
are, in some degree, what the "everlasting" is in flowers. Those minute
green leaves of theirs do not decay, nor fall.

But how do they die, or how stop growing, then?--it is the first thing I
want to know about them. And from all the books in the house, I can't as
yet find out this. Meanwhile I will look at the leaves themselves.

4. Going out to the garden, I bring in a bit of old brick, emerald green on
its rugged surface,[6] and a thick piece of mossy turf.

First, f