One part of the book, however, will, I think, be found of permanent value. Mr. Burgess has engraved on wood, in reduced size, with consummate skill, some of the excellent old drawings in the Flora Danica, and has interpreted, and facsimile'd, some of his own and my drawings from nature, with a vigour and precision unsurpassed in woodcut illustration, which render these outlines the best exercises in black and white I have yet been able to {11} prepare for my drawing pupils. The larger engravings by Mr. Allen may also be used with advantage as copies for drawings with pen or sepia. ROME, _10th May_ (_my father's birthday_). I found the 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.