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 men themselves know. No other
plants have so endless variety 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, useful
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 {20} better. If we think honestly,
our thoughts will not only live usefully, but even perish usefully--like
the moss--and become dark, not without due service. 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 _mossy_ instead of heathy; and is at last called by its
riders, briefly, 'the Moss': and as it is mainly at these same mossy places
that the riding is difficult, and brings out the gifts of horse and rider,
and discomfits all followers not similarly gifted, the skilled crosser of
them got his name, naturally, of 'moss-rider,' or moss-trooper. In which
manner the moss of Norway and Scotland has been a taskmaster and Maker of
Soldiers, as yet, the strongest known among natural powers. The lightning
may kill a man, or cast down a tower, but these little tender leaves of
moss--they and their progenitors--have trained the Northern Armies.

14. So much for