The Collaborative International Dictionary
Eucharis \Eu"cha*ris\, n. [NL., fr. L. eucharis agreeable, Gr. e'y`charis See Eucharist.] (Bot.) A genus of South American amaryllidaceous plants with large and beautiful white blossoms.
Wiktionary
n. A type of plant of the genus ''Eucharis'', found in Central and South America and with white flowers.
Wikipedia
Eucharis may refer to:
Eucharis is a genus of about 15-20 species of Neotropical plants in the Amaryllis family, native to Central America and South America, from Guatemala south to Bolivia. Some species have become naturalized in Mexico, the West Indies, and scattered tropical islands. The English name Amazon lily is sometimes used for all species in the genus (as well as other genera), but is particularly used for Eucharis amazonica and Eucharis × grandiflora, which are often confused.
Raymond Auguste Quinsac Monvoisin
Eucharis, who does not appear in Greek mythology, was one of the nymph Calypso's attendants in Fénelon's novel Les Aventures de Télémaque (1699). In Fénelon's modern prose epic, an improvisation upon Homeric themes, Telemachus while searching for his father, Odysseus, has been shipwrecked on Calypso's island, and there has fallen in love with Eucharis but must leave her, dutifully to pursue his quest.
Fénelon, in charge of the education of the heir to the French throne, admonished his readers to see the work "not as a frivolous novel, that is offered here, reader, for your idleness, but a learned parable". Its theme of the conflict between duty and love is a persistent one, central in French 17th-century classical theater, but peripheral to the Odyssey in spite of its erotic episodes. A sub-theme in Les Aventures de Télémaque, of spiritual education, is summed up by Mentor who says, "He who has not felt his weakness and the violence of his passions is not yet wise; for he does not yet understand himself and does not know how to distrust himself." Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who placed Mentor in charge of his son Telemachus, when Odysseus left for the Trojan War.
The story is perhaps best known from Jacques-Louis David's painting The Farewell of Telemachus and Eucharis, painted during David's exile in Brussels (1818), and now at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is also depicted in Frederick Leighton's Eucharis – A Girl with a Basket of Fruit (ca. 1863). She also appears, somewhat elliptically, in Arthur Rimbaud's Après le déluge:
Puis, dans la futaie violette, bourgeonnante, Eucharis me dit que c'était le printemps. “Then, in the violet wood, budding, Eucharis said to me it was Spring.”Usage examples of "eucharis".
A plant which is very easily affected by cold is a certain species of Eucharis lily.
The reason of this great power of resistance to heat is probably found in the fact that the Eucharis is a tropical plant, and is grown, in this country, in hot-houses where a comparatively high temperature is maintained.
She carried a bouquet of the same Eucharis lilies, and round her neck was a single string of pearls, her only ornament.
Duchess, timidly, her upraised face and Paris hat well matched by the gay poinsettias, the delicate eucharis and arums with which the table was now covered.
Unconsciously her hand closed upon a delicate blossom of eucharis and crushed it.