Is there no more there than brute matter, pipes and fibres, colour and shape, and the meaningless life-in-death which men call vegetation?
Those old Egyptian priests knew better, who could see in the number and the form of those ivory petals and golden stamina, in that mysterious daily birth out of the wave, in that nightly baptism, from which it rises each morning re-born to a new life, the signs of some divine idea, some mysterious law, common to the flower itself, to the white-robed priestess who held it in the temple rites, and to the goddess to whom they both were consecrated....

The flower of Isis!....

Ah!--well.

Nature has her sad symbols, as well as her fair ones.

And in proportion as a misguided nation has forgotten the worship of her to whom they owed their greatness, for novel and barbaric superstitions, so has her sacred flower grown rarer and more rare, till now--fit emblem of the worship over which it used to shed its perfume--it is only to be found in gardens such as these--a curiosity to the vulgar, and, to such as me, a lingering monument of wisdom and of glory past away.' Philammon, it may be seen, was far advanced by this time; for he bore the allusions to Isis without the slightest shudder.