L 
20 LILIUM CANADENSE.—AMERICAN YELLOW LILY. 
flowers which they highly esteemed, they gave to the red Lily a 
miraculous origin. It is said that a very excellent young god- 
dess, Sylvia, who was as fair as she was good, had but a poor 
opinion of Jupiter, who paid his addresses to her. Jupiter was 
not accustomed to such rebuffs, and treated the fair lady rather 
roughly; but she was so shocked at such rudeness, that her nose 
suddenly took to bleeding, and from a few drops which fell to 
the ground the red Lily sprung. The white Lily is said to be a 
later creation, and to have sprung from the milk of Juno, and, 
we are sorry to say, when she was in a somewhat intoxicated 
condition from imbibing too freely of nectar. Considering the 
more respectable origin of the red Lily, it seems scarcely just 
that most of the best Lily-poetry has been given to the white; 
and that the white Lily, not satisfied with what may be fairly her 
due, has taken some that belongs of right to her darker sister: 
for the Lily which Solomon in all his glory could not compete 
with.was much more probably of the red than the white kind. 
If we are asked to 
“ Bring Lilies for a maiden’s grave,” 
or if, on Percival’s invitation, we go to 
“a sweet green spot 
Where a Lily is blooming fair,” 
or, with Keats, to look at one 
“who grew 
Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherished,” 
or to see the 
“Lady lily gently looking down,” 
or in fact to imagine any poetic Lily whatever, the chance is 
that we shall be called on to go where the 
“Queen of the field, in a milk-white mantle drest, 
The lovely Lily waved her curling crest.” 
It is, however, some satisfaction to feel after all this poetic ~ 
slight of the old world on fair Sylvia’s devotion to womanly 
