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You require a deep-sea-lead of uncommonly cunning construction to sound, register, and compare the profundities of the bathos in novels. The book has about 400 folio pages very closely packed with type, besides an alphabetical index full of Hebrew and Greek derivations of its names "Gnothisauton," "Achamoth," "Ametameletus," "Dogmapernes," and so forth.
One morning the girls were having a lesson in grammar, and were diligently repeating Latin derivations and Anglo-Saxon suffixes, when some chance called Patty's attention to Enid. She noticed the latter open her desk stealthily, and draw out a tiny paper box, which she placed on her knee, and covered with her pocket handkerchief. Patty wondered what she was doing.
But after making proper allowance for the Gipsy tendency, or rather passion, for perverting words towards possible derivations, it seems very probable that the term is purely Hindu. Zuhru, or Zohru, means in the East Venus, or the morning star; and it is pleasant to find a reflection of the rosy goddess in the Gipsy soor, signifying "early in the morning."
Alexander Wilder, states that the term "Nymphe" and its derivations were used to designate young women, brides, the marriage chamber, the lotus flower, oracular temples and the labiae minores of the human female. The lotus then, which is found throughout antiquity, in art as well as in religion, was a sexual symbol, representing to the ancients the combination of male and female sexual organs.
And here I would venture to beg the adherents of the 'Celtic' school to use a little more judgment in their attribution of sources. Visits to the Otherworld are not always derivations from Celtic Fairy-lore. Unless I am mistaken the root of this theme is far more deeply imbedded than in the shifting sands of Folk and Fairy tale.
The slang dictionaries give fanciful derivations from Anglo-Saxon roots, or suggest that it is a perversion of "chose"; but it is a common Hindustani word for a thing, and when an Englishman in India finds some article which exactly suits his purpose and exclaims, "Ah! that's the cheese," no one needs to ask the derivation.
The Ancient Mariner, as also, in its measure, Christabel, is a "romantic" poem, impressing us by bold invention, and appealing to that taste for the supernatural, that longing for le frisson, a shudder, to which the "romantic" school in Germany, and its derivations in England and France, directly ministered.
I have left, in the examples, to every authour his own practice unmolested, that the reader may balance suffrages, and judge between us: but this question is not always to be determined by reputed or by real learning; some men, intent upon greater things, have thought little on sounds and derivations; some, knowing in the ancient tongues, have neglected those in which our words are commonly to be sought.
Darwin, for instance, did more than any one since Newton to prove that mechanism is universal, but without apparently believing that it really was so, or caring about the question at all. In natural history, observation has not yet come within range of accurate processes; it merely registers habits and traces empirical derivations.
There were genealogical and chronological charts of Kings and Kaisars, comparisons of historical characters, tables of Christian names and their derivations, botanical lists, maps, and drawings all in such confusion, that once, when Helen attempted to find the Pope contemporary with Edward the First, she asked Elizabeth why she had written the Pope down as Leo Nonus Cardinal, on which she was informed, with a sufficient quantity of laughter, that the word in question was the name of a flower, Leonurus Cardiaca, looking like anything but what it was intended for in Elizabeth's writing, and that Pope Martin the Fourth was to be found on the other side of the Kings of France and Spain, and the portrait of Charles the First.
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