ees put on their leaves successively, the
tinting of light, dark, and yellowish green are infinitely varied and
pleasing.

Nor must I pass over, in my picture of evergreen, the mosses and ferns
of the mountains of Virginia. More fragile than the trees and shrubs,
they cannot be considered less beautiful. Indeed, the mosses of Cheat
Mountain are the most luxuriant, exquisite, delicate, and richly
beautiful things in nature. No dream of fairyland could, to my
imagination, be lovelier than are the evergreen heights of these
mountains, covered, matted, fringed, heaped, piled as they are with the
greatest variety of mosses of the most delicate texture, feathery forms,
and wondrously beautiful combinations. No one who has not seen them can
have any just conception of mountain mosses, nor of the marvellous
luxuriance of beauty with which they clothe rock, and tree, and earth,
and everything upon these lone wild slopes and summits. Over the rocks,
amid the mosses, hang the long pendent ferns, in richer, darker green.
And with the grand old pine and fir trees lifting their heads to the
heavens, and the thick tanglewood of shrub and underbrush, there is
grandeur, grace, and beauty in bewildering, changeful, and ravishing
confusion.

How I have loved, in leisure hours, to turn aside from the stern duties
of the field, or the dull monotony of the camp, to gallop under the
great pines, or wind through pathless thickets and native parks of
evergreen, feasting my very soul on their eternal freshness and glory!
How I have loved to see 'Black Hawk' crush with his feet, and sink up to
his fetlocks, in the tender and fairy-like mosses that drape the
mountains! How I have delighted to weave the trailing evergreens into
wreaths, trellises, and bowers in front of my white tent! And, alas!
with hushed and solemn pride, I have planted the holly and the pine on
the graves of my dead comrades, hoping they might live in all their
wondrous beauty over the quiet mound, and keep green the memory of the
brave forever!

DYING IN THE HOSPITAL.

I am dying, mother, dying, in the hospital alone;
With a hundred faces round me, not a single one is known;
And the human heart within me, like a fluttering, wounded dove,
Hungers with a ceaseless yearning for one answering word of love.

Oh, 'tis hard, 'tis hard, my mother, thus to linger day by day,
Dying here, without the music of the battle's fierce array;--
Dying,