But we must return to our lilies.  There is no sense of wealth like floating in this archipelago of white and green.  The emotions of avarice become almost demoralizing.  Every flower bears a fragrant California in its bosom, and you feel impoverished at the thought of leaving one behind.  But after the first half-hour of eager grasping, one becomes fastidious, rather scorns those on which the wasps and flies have alighted, and seeks only the stainless.  But handle them tenderly, as if you loved them.  Do not grasp at the open flower as if it were a peony or a hollyhock, for then it will come off, stalkless, in your hand, and you will cast it blighted upon the water; but coil your thumb and second finger affectionately around it, press the extended forefinger firmly to the stem below, and with one steady pull you will secure a long and delicate stalk, fit to twine around the graceful head of your beloved, as the Hindoo goddess of beauty encircled with a Lotus the brow of Rama.

Consider the lilies.  All over our rural watercourses, at midsummer, float these cups of snow.  They are Nature’s symbols of coolness.  They suggest to us the white garments of their Oriental worshippers.  They come with the white roses and prepare the way for the white lilies of the garden.  The white doe of Rylstone and Andrew Marvell’s fawn might fitly bathe amid their beauties.  Yonder steep bank slopes down to the lake-side, one solid mass of pale pink laurel, but, once upon the water, a purer tint prevails.  The pink fades into a lingering flush, and the white creature floats peerless, set in green without and gold within.  That bright circle of stamens is the very ring with which Doges once wedded the Adriatic, Venice has lost it, but it dropped into the water-lily’s bosom, and there it rests forever.  So perfect in form, so redundant in beauty, so delicate, so spotless, so fragrant,—­what presumptuous lover ever dared, in his most enamored hour, to liken his mistress to a water-lily?  No human Blanche or Lilian was ever so fair as that.

The water-lily comes of an ancient and sacred family of white-robed priests.  They assisted at the most momentous religious ceremonies, from the beginning of recorded time.  The Egyptian Lotus was a sacred plant; it was dedicated to Harpocrates and to the god Nofr Atmoo,—­Nofr meaning good, whence the name of our yellow lily, Nuphar.  But the true Egyptian flower was Nymphaea Lotus, though Nymphaea caerulea, Moore’s “blue water-lilies,” can be traced on the sculptures also.  It was cultivated in tanks in the gardens; it was the chief material for festal wreaths; a single bud hung over the forehead of many a queenly dame; and the sculptures represent the weary flowers as dropping from the heated hands of belles, in the later hours of the feast.  Rock softly on the waters, fair lilies! your Eastern kindred have rocked on the stormier bosom of Cleopatra.  The Egyptian Lotus was, moreover, the emblem of the sacred Nile,—­as