must get this very clearly into our heads. Fig. 2, A, is a little tuft
of a common wood moss of Norway,[10] in its fruit season, of its real size;
but at present I want to look at the central fibre and its leaves
accurately, and understand that first.

10. Pulling it to pieces, we find it composed of seven little
company-keeping fibres, each of which, by itself, appears as in Fig. 2, B:
but as in this, its real size, it {18} is too small, not indeed for our
respect, but for our comprehension, we magnify it, Fig. 2, C, and thereupon
perceive it to be indeed composed of, _a_, the small fibrous root which
sustains the plant; _b_, the leaf-surrounded stem which is the actual
being, and main creature, moss; and, _c_, the aspirant pillar, and cap, of
its fructification.

11. But there is one minor division yet. You see I have drawn the central
part of the moss plant (_b_, Fig. 2,) half in outline and half in black;
and that, similarly, in the upper group, which is too small to show the
real roots, the base of the cluster is black. And you remember, I doubt
not, how often in gathering what most invited gathering, of deep green,
starry, perfectly soft and living wood-moss, you found it fall asunder in
your hand into multitudes of separate threads, each with its bright green
crest, and long root of blackness.

That blackness at the root--though only so notable in this wood-moss and
collateral species, is indeed a general character of the mosses, with rare
exceptions. It is their funeral blackness;--that, I perceive, is the way
the moss leaves die. They do not fall--they do not visibly decay. But they
decay _in_visibly, in continual secession, beneath the ascending crest.
They rise to form that crest, all green and bright, and take the light and
air from those out of which they grew;--and those, their ancestors, darken
and die slowly, and at last become a mass of mouldering ground. In fact, as
I perceive farther, their final duty is so to die. The main work of other
leaves is {19} in their life,--but these have to form the earth out of
which all other leaves are to grow. Not to cover the rocks 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