MOSSES AND LICHENS

     Moss and lichens: Meek creatures! The first mercy of the earth, veiling with hushed softness its dintless rocks. No words that I know of will say what mosses are. None are delicate enough, none perfect enough, none rich enough. How is one to tell of the rounded bosses of furred and beam­ing green-the starred divisions of rubied bloom, fine filmed, as if the rock spirits could spin porphyry as we do glass- the traceries of intricate silver, and fringes of amber, lustrous, arborescent, burnished through every fiber into fitful brightness and glossy traverses of silken change, yet all subdued and pensive, and framed for simplest, sweetest offices of grace. They will not be gathered, like the flowers, for chaplet or love token; but of these the wild bird will make his nest and the wearied child his pillow.

     And as the earth's first mercy, so they are its last gift to us. When all other service is vain, from plant and tree, the soft mosses and gray lichens take up their watch for the headstone. The woods, the blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses have done their parts for a time, but these do service forever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.

      Yet as in one sense the humblest; in another they are the most honored of the earth children, unfading as motionless, the worm frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in lowliness, they neither: blanch in heat nor pine in frost. To them, slow-fingered, constant-hearted, is entrusted the weaving of the dark eternal tapestries of the hills; to them, slow-penciled, iris-dyed, the tender framing of their endless imagery. Sharing the stillness of the unim­passioned rock, they share also its endurance; and while the winds of departing spring scatter the white hawthorn blossom like drifted snow, and summer dims on the parched meadow the drooping of its cowslip-gold, far above, among the mountains, the-silver lichen-spots rest, star-like, on the stone; and the gathering orange stain upon the edge of yonder western peak reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

            By the Contributor'-The reader will not fail to notcte that this beautiful conclusion is in verse:

                  The gathering orange stain

            Upon the edge of yonder western peak.

            Reflects the sunsets of a thousand years.

This we conceive to be, upon the whole, the finest, passage of its order in the world; the most poetical, the most beautifully-imagined and the most exquisitely expressed.