y peoples to express
the creative spirit which gives life and vegetation to matter. Lacshmi,
the beautiful Hindu goddess of abundance, corresponding to the Venus
Aphrodite of the Greeks, was called "the Lotus-born," as having
ascended from the ocean in this flower. Here, again, is the inevitable
intermingling of the eternal principles of Beauty, Love, and the
Creative Power in that pure triune medallion image which the ancients so
tenderly cherished and so exquisitely worshipped with vestal fires and
continual sacrifices of Art. Old Father Nile, reflecting in his deep,
mysterious breast the monstrous temples of Nubia and Pylae, bears
eloquent witness to the earnestness and sincerity of the old votive
homage to Isis, "the Lotus-crowned" Venus of Egypt. For the symbolic
Water-Lily, _recreated_ by human Art, blooms forever in the capitals of
Karnac and Thebes, and wherever columns were reared and lintels laid
throughout the length and breadth of the "Land of Bondage." It is the
key-note of all that architecture; and a brief examination into
the principles of this, new birth of the Lotus, of the monumental
straightening and stiffening of its graceful and easy lines, will afford
some insight into the strange processes of the human mind, when it
follows the grandest impulse of Love, and out of the material beauties
of Nature creates a work of Art.

It is well known that the religion of the old Egyptians led them to
regard this life as a mere temporary incident, an unimportant phase of
their progress toward that larger and grander state imaged to them with
mysterious sublimity in the idea of Death or Eternity. In accordance
with this belief, they expressed in their dwellings the sentiment of
transitoriness and vicissitude, and in their tombs the immortality of
calm repose. And so their houses have crumbled into dust ages ago, but
their tombs are eternal. In all the relations of Life the sentiment of
Death was present in some form or other. The hallowed mummies of their
ancestors were the most sacred mortgages of their debts, and to redeem
them speedily was a point of the highest honor. They had corpses at
their feasts to remind them how transitory were the glory and happiness
of the world, how eternal the tranquillity of Death.

Now, how was this prevailing idea expressed in their Art? They looked
around them and saw that all Organic Life was full of movement and wavy
lines; their much-loved Lotus undulated and bent playfully