Shakespeare has many beautiful passages concerning the lily. He often refers to its whiteness. He considers it as impossible a task "to paint the lily" as it is "to gild refined gold," or "to throw a perfume on the violet." How the lily was loved by the ancients! The Egyptians adored it; the Persians named cities for it; the Hebrews worshiped it. The Greeks and Romans called the lily Juno's flower, and fancied that the flower owed its very existence to drops of milk spilled on earth from Juno's white breast when she was nursing the infant Hercules. The church consecrated the lily to the Virgin Mary. It was her flower as Queen of Heaven. In many old religious paintings of the Annunciation, the Angel Gabriel, appearing before the Virgin, usually holds the "Annunciation Lily," or "Madonna Lily" in his hand. Joseph's staff was said to have blossomed into lilies, and it is the white lily that is usually represented in this connection. Wonderful family this lily tribe, flowers of the grand style and haughty demeanor! Ruskin enlightens us as to why it is every one loves them and why they are entwined with many of our thoughts of art and life: "Under the name of _Drosidæ_ come plants delighting in interrupted moisture--moisture which comes either partially, or at certain seasons--into dry ground. They are not water-plants, but the signs of water resting among dry places. In the _Drosidæ_ the floral spirit passes into the calix also, and the entire flower becomes a six-rayed star, bursting out of the stem laterally, as if it were the first of flowers and had made its way to the light by force through the unwilling green. They are often required to retain moisture, or nourishment, for the future blossom through long times of drought; and this they do in bulbs underground, of which some become a rude and simple, but most wholesome food for man. "Then the _Drosidæ_ are divided into five great orders--lilies, asphodels, amaryllis, irids and rushes. No tribes of flowers have had so great, so varied, or so healthy an influence on man as this great group of _Drosidæ_, depending not so much on the whiteness of some of their blossoms, or the radiance of others, as on the strength and delicacy of the substance of their petals; enabling them to take forms of faultless, elastic curvature, either in cups, as the Crocus, or expanding bells, as the true Lily, or heath-like bells, as the Hyacinth, or bright and perfect stars, like the Star of Bethlehem, or, when they are affected by the strange reflex of the serpent nature which forms the labiate group of all flowers, closing into forms of exquisitely fantastic symmetry as the Gladiolus. Put by their side their Nereid sisters, the Water-lilies, and you have in them the origin of the loveliest forms of ornamental design and the most powerful floral myths yet recognized among human spirits, born by the streams of the Ganges, Nile, Arno and Avon.