Francis Bacon and his secret society - Grand Lodge of Colorado

252 FRANCIS BACON
See the lovely creation from these elements:
Pros. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes and groves,
And ye that on the sands with printless foot
Do chase the ebbing Neptune and do fly him
When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
By moonshine do the green-sour ringlets make,
Whereof the ewe not bites, and you whose pastime
Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
To hear the solemu curfew; by whose aid,
Weak masters though ye be, I have bediinm'd
The noontide suu, call'd forth the mutinous winds,
Aud 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault
Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder
Have I given fire and rifted Jove's stout oak
With his own bolt; the strong-based promontory
Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck'd up
The pine and cedar: graves at my command
Have waked their sleepers, oped, and let 'em forth
By my so potent art.
These lines give us hints of Bacon's curious " Experiments
Touching the Rudiments of Plants, of Excrescences," etc.
" Moss," he says, " coineth of moisture," aud is made of the
sap of the tree " which is not so frank as to rise all
the boughs,
but tireth by the ivay and putteth out moss. " i
A quaint idea
full of that Paracelsian notion of the spirits or souls of things,
and very Baconian, too. Bacon thought that the winds had
something to do with such growths, for trees are said to bear
most moss that " stand bleak and upon the winds." Next to
moss he speaks of mushrooms, which he associates with moss,
as being " likewise an imperfect plant." Mushrooms have two
strange properties. " the one is, they yield so delicious a meat "
(therefore they are deserving of the fairies' trouble in
growing
them); " the other, that they come up so hastily, and yet they are
unsown " (and how could that be except they were sown by the
fairies?). Like moss, " they come of moisture, and are tvindy,
but the windiness is not sharp and griping;" they are, therefore,
unlike " the green-sour ringlets " which the fairies make in the
1 Nat. Hist. vi. 540.