veiling
with hushed softness its dintless rocks; creatures full of pity,
covering with strange and tender honour the scarred disgrace of ruin,
laying quiet finger on the trembling stones to teach them rest. No
words, that I know of, will say what these 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 fibre
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 its 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 lichen take up their watch by the headstone. The woods, the
blossoms, the gift-bearing grasses, have done their parts for a time;
but these do service for ever. Trees for the builder's yard, flowers
for the bride's chamber, corn for the granary, moss for the grave.

60. LICHENS.--As in one sense the humblest, in another they are the
most honoured of the earth-children. Unfading as motionless, the worm
frets them not, and the autumn wastes not. Strong in loveliness, 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-pencilled, 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.

SECTION VIII.

EDUCATION.

61. The most helpful and sacred work which can at present be done for
humanity, is to teach people (chiefly by example, as all best teaching
must be done) not how "to better themselves," but how t