tus-solitude.

This is Brahminism; but the other great form of Oriental religion has
carried the same fair symbol with it. One of the Bibles of the
Buddhists is named "The White Lotus of the Good Laer." A pious
Nepaulese bowed in reverence before a vase of lilies which perfumed
the study of Sir William Jones. At sunset in Thibet, the French
missionaries tell us, every inhabitant of every village prostrates
himself in the public square, and the holy invocation, "Oh, the gem in
the Lotus!" goes murmuring over hill and valley, like the sound of
many bees. It is no unmeaning phrase, but an utterance of ardent
desire to be absorbed into that Brahma whose emblem is the sacred
flower. The mystic formula or "mani" is imprinted on the pavement of
the streets, it floats on flags from the temples, and the wealthy
Buddhists maintain sculptor-missionaries, Old Mortalities of the
water-lily, who, wandering to distant lands, carve the blessed words
upon cliff and stone.

Having got thus far into Orientalism, we can hardly expect to get out
again without some slight entanglement in philology. Lily-pads. Whence
_pads_? No other leaf is identified with that singular monosyllable.
Has our floating Lotus-leaf any connection with padding, or with a
footpad? with the ambling pad of an abbot, or a paddle, or a paddock,
or a padlock? with many-domed Padua proud, or with St. Patrick? Is the
name derived from the Anglo-Saxon _paad_ or _petthian_, or the Greek
[Greek: pateo]? All the etymologists are silent; Tooke and Richardson
ignore the problem; and of the innumerable pamphlets in the Worcester
and Webster Controversy, loading the tables of school-committee-men,
not one ventures to grapple with the lily-pad.

But was there ever a philological trouble for which the Sanscrit could
not afford at least a conjectural cure? A dictionary of that extremely
venerable tongue is an ostrich's stomach, which can crack the hardest
etymological nut. The Sanscrit name for the Lotus is simply _Padma_.
The learned Brahmins call the Egyptian deities Padma Devi, or
Lotus-Gods; the second of the eighteen Hindoo Puranas is styled the
Padma Purana, because it treats of the "epoch when the world was a
golden Lotus"; and the sacred incantation which goes murmuring through
Thibet is "Om mani padme houm." It would be singular, if upon these
delicate floating leaves a fragment of our earliest vernacular has
been borne down to us, so that here the schoolboy is more lea