"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... see The valley of sweet waters, were to know Earth paved like Heaven; and to seem such to me Even now what wants thy stream?—that it should Lethe be: * * * * * * * But o'er the blacken'd memory's blighting dream Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... and when he had heard me to the end he said: "I might have thought of that. You sometimes need a cup of Lethe water. But now let such things alone, and don't compromise your reputation as a scientist by ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... Three hours of first-rate music for 7-1/5 cents! And a mass of Loewenbraeu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... prepares the reader to wonder why it is that Manfred is so desirous to drink of Lethe. He has acquired dominion over spirits, and he finds, in the possession of the power, that knowledge has only brought him sorrow. They tell him he is immortal, and what he suffers is as inextinguishable as his ...
— The Life of Lord Byron • John Galt
... creation of man, the fall and its consequences, and informs him how all the plants that grow on earth originate here. The water at his feet issues from an unquenchable fountain, and divides into two streams, the first of which, Lethe, "chases from the mind the memory of sin," while the waters of the second, Eunoe, have the power to recall "good deeds ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... was tempered by a pleasant breeze. Mr. Hoopdriver was possessed by unreasonable contentment; he lit himself a cigarette and lounged more comfortably. Surely the Sussex ale is made of the waters of Lethe, of poppies and pleasant dreams. ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... itinerary of Egyptian souls. Very probably similar instruction was given to the initiate at Eleusis. But the Fijians also have a regular theory of what is to be done and avoided on "The Path of the Shades." The shade is ferried by Ceba (Charon) over Wainiyalo (Lethe); he reaches the mystic pandanus tree (here occurs a rite); he meets, and dodges, Drodroyalo and the two devouring Goddesses; he comes to a spring, and drinks, and forgets sorrow at Wai-na-dula, the "Water of Solace." After half-a-dozen other probations and terrors, he reaches the Gods, "the ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... ghost around its sepulchre To linger out my days? Or call you that A life of conscious happiness and joy, When every hour, dream'd listlessly away, Still leadeth onward to those gloomy days, Which the sad troop of the departed spend In self-forgetfulness on Lethe's shore? A useless life is but an early death; This woman's destiny hath still ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... Sarah went down in my list with a large print Testament for Pete. Then I found that some of the people, some of the old ones, who in youth had been accustomed to it, like nothing so well as tea; it was ambrosia and Lethe mingled; and a packet of tea was put in my list next to the Testament. But the tea must have sugar; and I could not bear that they should drink it out of mugs, without any teaspoons; so to please myself I sent for a little delf ware and a few ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell
... Satan, and the South the Holy Ghost, which the two eyes look upon. For the bishop looks upon the South to invite, but the dean upon the North to avoid it. The one sees to be saved, the other not to be lost. The brow of the church beholds with these eyes the candles of Heaven and the darkness of Lethe. Thus the senseless stones enwrap the mysteries of the living stones, the work made with hands sets forth the spiritual work; and the double aspect of the Church is clear, adorned with double equipage. A golden majesty paints the entry of the choir: and properly in his proper image Christ crucified ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... hoped; but now, alas! Well, well; 'tis over now, and let it pass. I was a fool—perchance I am so still; You won't accept it! Let me dream you will: But that were idle. Shall we meet again? Why should we? Water for my burning brain? I could have loved thee—Could! I love thee yet Can only Lethe teach me to forget? Oblivion's balm, oh tell me where to find! Is it a tenant of the anguish'd mind? Or is it?—ha! at last I see it come; Waiter! a bottle of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... mere social machine-shop, a place of vanished glories during the adolescence of Miss Alice, and no Diana had stooped to kiss the forgotten young Endymion sleeping in the Lethe of a New York business obscurity. Clayton's life had been gilded ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... frescoes started out in the slant of the sunrise like dead faces floating to the surface of a river. Dead faces, yes: plaintive spectres of his childish fears and longings, lost in the harsh daylight of experience. He had forgotten the very dreams they stood for: Lethe flowed between and only one voice reached across the torrent. It was that of Saint Francis, lover of ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... place is this!' exclaimed the Countess, as the carriage penetrated the deeper recesses of the woods. 'Surely, my lord, you do not mean to pass all the autumn in this barbarous spot! One ought to bring hither a cup of the waters of Lethe, that the remembrance of pleasanter scenes may not heighten, at least, ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... to the lade and cool his hands in the running water. It was an interesting spectacle to see four able-bodied sinners, who yesterday had given themselves to the study of Nature, now kneeling together, to efface their penalty in our waters of Lethe; but you must remember that they made no moan before the boys, and no complaint against the master. The school received them with respect when they came out, and Speug would indicate with a wink and a jerk of his head that Bulldog had exceeded himself; but ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... takes "every creature in, of every kind." No fastidious delicacy spoils their sports of fancy: though ten times told, the tale to them never can be tedious; though dull "as the fat weed that grows on Lethe's bank," the jest for them has all the poignancy of satire: on the very offals, the garbage of wit, they can feed and batten. Happy they who can find in every jester the wit of Sterne or Swift; who else can wade through hundreds ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. IV • Maria Edgeworth
... Lethe of Nature Can't trance him again, Whose soul sees the Perfect His eyes seek ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... Shall I believe the Siren South again, And, oft betray'd, not know the monster main?" He said: his fasten'd hands the rudder keep, And, fix'd on heav'n, his eyes repel invading sleep. The god was wroth, and at his temples threw A branch in Lethe dipp'd, and drunk with Stygian dew: The pilot, vanquish'd by the pow'r divine, Soon clos'd his swimming eyes, and lay supine. Scarce were his limbs extended at their length, The god, insulting with superior strength, Fell heavy on him, plung'd ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... known as the Miss-sell-any) was published in 1809, under the title of Imitations and Translations from The Ancient and Modern Classics. Byron contributed nine original poems. The volume was not a success. "It foundered ... in the Gulph of Lethe."—Letter to H. Drury, July 17, 1811, Letters, 1898, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... What! Shall the church draw and put up again the spiritual sword at the pleasure of princes? Or because princes will perhaps cast holy things to dogs, must others do so likewise? O prodigious licentiousness, and hellish misorder, worthy to be drowned in the lake of Lethe! But what, then, is the part of the prince, after that the church hath given judgment? Surely, whensoever need is, he ought, by the private judgment of Christian discretion, to try and examine whether this discipline be rightly ...
— The Works of Mr. George Gillespie (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Gillespie
... profound touch that was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some one could teach him to forget. Lethe is the grandest ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality! Who can thus avoid all pledges and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence,—must always ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... is cheered for a while, because there is still one of the fibres of the root of hope left in her forlorn breast, and a languid smile will flit over her wan and prematurely faded face. Yes, she forgives, though there is no River Lethe for her to drink from in this life; showing that her love is the most pure in this world, and the nearest approach to the love that God has ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... and trace dispassionately its light and shadow. Having satisfied myself that I had been deceived in the quantity of opium I had taken, I became also convinced that I had at last discovered the great antidote for which philosophy had exhausted its resources, the fabled Lethe, the oblivion of human sorrow. The strong necessity of suicide had passed away; life, even for me, might be rendered tolerable by the sovereign panacea of opium, the only true minister to a mind diseased, the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'T is that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep[dh] Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,[di] Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep: Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; A mortal mother would ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... Round Table were poor day-labourers, employed to row over the rivers of Cocytus, Phlegeton, Styx, Acheron, and Lethe, when my lords the devils had a mind to recreate themselves upon the water, as in the like occasion are hired the boatmen at Lyons, the gondoliers of Venice, and oars at London. But with this difference, that these poor knights have only for their fare a bob ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... No lust To justify the wretch who binds his soul In the drear darkness of a murky cell, Scraping for gold as beasts do in the earth For carrion, and counting life-time out By ducats; closing house and heart alike To the benignant sunshine. If our hearts Could lave in Lethe's cleansing stream sometimes, Till evil vanished from its memory, And left a virgin tablet for the pen Of Nature, life would be as sweet ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... sham-sentiments, the temptations to look back and pose. The music of our lyre is the love and thought we bring to our every-day life. Let us keep steadily on with the music, and lead our Eurydice right through Hades until we have her safely over the Lethe, and we know sentimentality only ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... in Boeotia, though he was nothing more than a hero, was in great reputation.(83) After many preliminary ceremonies, as washing in the river, offering sacrifices, drinking a water called Lethe, from its quality of making people forget every thing, the votaries went down into his cave, by small ladders, through a very narrow passage. At the bottom was another little cavern, the entrance of which was also exceeding small. There they lay down upon the ground, with ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... us to repose, and the waters of Lethe swept over us. As the Angel of Dreams threw his mantle over me, through this gauzy mantle I seemed to trace the Queen of the Falls from earth, with her guardian angels, to the fields of Paradise, which appeared in my dream as described by the Jesuit that used to come and preach ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... candles a year ago, will be darkened. There will be no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and Master Cratchit have gone to the front. But Tiny Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left, and my child is left, and yours—even your dear dreamchild "upon the tedious shores of Lethe" that always comes back at Christmas. It takes only one little child to make Christmas—one little child, and the angels who companion him, and the shepherds who come to see him, and the Wise Men who worship ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... and fig-tree." "It seems to me," said Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... its ideal, that to those who have reflected upon it and justly apprehended it, it has become unplayable. As well attempt to score the music of the spheres, or to paint "the fat weed that roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf." In "King Lear" there is a personage who may be very instructively compared with others of the same kind by the student of Shakespeare's mental development. This is the Fool. Shakespeare's fools or clowns (such as those in "Love's Labor's Lost" and ...
— The Galaxy - Vol. 23, No. 1 • Various
... mist, except the very summit, over which the Moon was hanging. The peacefulness of the hour stole into his heart, and his brain calmed down. The mountain suggested to him the past, and the pure, white mist shrouding it seemed like vapour risen from the merciful waters of Lethe. The Moon suggested hope, vague and undefined, lint still hope. With the swing as of a pendulum his consciousness swept back from the dark night of despondency and bathed its wings in light. Then his soothed spirit felt the need of sleep, so he entered the house and began to prepare ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... Who can escape? To live is to remember. To die—oh, who would forget! Even had I been weeping, and not merely mocking time away, would my tears be of Lethe at my mouth's corners? No," said Anthea, "why feign and lie? All I am is but a memory lovely ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... thee; I, Obscurity, The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe; I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... what looked like a mountain in that subterranean region, rising from the ground, with a stream running at its base. We crossed several rivers; besides the "Echo," one called the "Styx," the other the "Lethe." Our guide had brought a net, with which he caught some fish and crawfish. On examining them we could discover no appearance of eyes, while, from being deprived of the warm rays of the sun, they were perfectly white. Uncle Denis remarked ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... them wear the silent chains of brutes, the bloodthirsty souls he encloses in bears, the thieves in wolves, the deceivers in foxes; where, after successive years and a thousand forms, man had spent his life, and after purgation in Lethe's flood, at last he restores them to the primordial human shapes." —Claudian, ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... that consumes, with dule assiduous grieving, Me from the Learned Maids (Hortalus!) ever seclude, Nor can avail sweet births of the Muses thou to deliver Thought o' my mind; (so much floats it on flooding of ills: For that the Lethe-wave upsurging of late from abysses, 5 Laved my brother's foot, paling with pallor of death, He whom the Trojan soil, Rhoetean shore underlying, Buries for ever and aye, forcibly snatched from our sight. * * * * I can address; no more ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... deadly hate; Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus, named of lamentation loud Heard on the rueful stream; fierce Phlegeton, Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage. Far off from these, a slow and silent stream, Lethe, the river of oblivion, rolls Her watery labyrinth, whereof who drinks Forthwith his former state and being forgets— Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Beyond this flood a frozen continent ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... lights, flowers, stars, colours, and sweet odours, and are sheltered awhile from heaven and hell; then in some moment the bubble bursts, and the god awakens and knows himself, and he rises again with giant strength to conquer; or else he succumbs, and the waves of Lethe, perhaps in mercy, blot out ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top. Steals drowsily and musically Into the univeral valley. The rosemary nods upon the grave; The lily lolls upon the wave; Wrapping the fog about its breast, The ruin moulders into rest; Looking like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not, for the world, awake. All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies (Her easement open to the skies) ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... herbage is still luxuriant, its flowers endless and fragrant, its trees, melodious with birds, rustle with the balmy wind, its waters serve to irrigate the garden as well as to help the soul. These waters, the rivers Lethe and Eunoe, are produced from heavenly sources and have miraculous powers. The former removes the memory of sin; the latter restores the recollection of virtuous deeds, a poetical way of expressing the Catholic dogma, that with the revival of grace ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... apt, And duller should'st thou be then the fat weede[2] [Sidenote: 194] That rots it selfe in ease, on Lethe Wharfe,[4] [Sidenote: rootes[3]] Would'st thou not stirre in this. Now Hamlet heare: It's giuen out, that sleeping in mine Orchard, [Sidenote: 'Tis] A Serpent stung me: so the whole eare of Denmarke, Is by a forged processe of my death Rankly abus'd: But know thou ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... of repetition, as regards the human will, is as sure in Determination as it is in Consciousness. Habit is as inevitable as Memory; and as nothing can be forgotten, but, when once known, is known forever,—so nothing is done but will be done again. Lethe and Annihilation are only myths upon the earth, which men, though suspicious of their eternal falsehood, name to themselves in moments of despair and fearful apprehension. The poppy has only a fabled virtue; but, like Persephone, we have all tasted ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... rivers and the brooklets Have subdued their wild, free rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the wide, primeval limits Bound neat villages and districts. There are Bryantsville and Fitchport, Buckeye, Logan Town and Tyro, Duncan Town and Buena Vista, Hyattville, Paint Lick, and Lowell, Clustered ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Styx, you soon meet another stream, appropriately called Lethe. The echoes here are absolutely stunning. A single voice sounds like a powerful choir; and could an organ be played, it would deprive the hearer of his senses. When you have crossed, you enter a high level hall, named the Great Walk, half a mile of which brings ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... bridle gates, creeping through gaps, and cantering along the green rides of a wood, thus causing a healthy excitement, with no painful reaction: and if, unhappily, soured or overpressed by work and anxious thoughts, drinking in such draughts of Lethe as ...
— A New Illustrated Edition of J. S. Rarey's Art of Taming Horses • J. S. Rarey
... so on, until all are numbered among her followers and wear the livery she has prescribed. Garrick's opinion of those playgoers of his time, whom he at last banished from his stage, may be gathered from the dialogue between AEsop and the Fine Gentleman, in his farce of "Lethe." AEsop inquires: "How do you spend your evening, sir?" "I dress in the evening," says the Fine Gentleman, "and go generally behind the scenes of both playhouses; not, you may imagine, to be diverted with the play, but ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... need of him stirred the emotions of a selfish people. This new world moved on unmindful, through its travail and incalculable change, to unknown ends. He, Daren Lane, had been left alone on the vast and naked shores of Lethe. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... aches, and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness, That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest ...
— Book of English Verse • Bulchevy
... morning. As the day dawned the dull grey steamy clouds settled down on us once more, while the rain fell in a regular waterspout. It was anything but a cheering prospect to look along the dreary vistas of the dull brimful Lethe—like stream, with nothing to be seen but the heavy lowering sky above, the red swollen water beneath, and the gigantic trees high towering overhead, and growing close to the water's edge, laced together with black snake—like ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever. Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... arrogance, or when he stood as now, staring at the far-off smoky wall of the Hills, as though he hoped to find there, some day farther on, a wonderful message awaiting him, or some friend whom he had lost when he swam Lethe, ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... preferred to say little, for she was tired, and made haste to get into bed. It was not long before the subject of their plans and problems and visions of spies and "jam-stained fists" were lost in the lethe of dreamland. ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... he answered; "and on the way there is the orchard where grow the golden apples of Hesperides, and the dragon is dead now that used to guard them, and so any one may help himself to the beautiful fruit. And by the side of the orchard flows the river Lethe, of which it is not well for man to drink, though many men would taste it gladly." And ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... me in my desolation Caress the soft loose hair a moment's span. Since Loveliness is Life's one Consolation, And love the only Lethe left to man. ...
— India's Love Lyrics • Adela Florence Cory Nicolson (AKA Laurence Hope), et al.
... and youth, and move us only by the exact amount of humanity they possess in common with ourselves. Homer and aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Phidias, live not by the sacred in them, but by the human: and, but for this common bond, Hellenic art would have been submerged in the same Lethe that has drowned the Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian Theogonies and arts. And, if we except form, what other thing does Hellenic art offer to the modern artist, that is not thoroughly opposed to his faith, wants, and practice? And thought—thought in accordance with all the lines of his knowledge, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now, I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a corner... but... the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... Among the poor, the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their condition, do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighborhood, and gradually sink ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... the first place it banishes all manner of cares, and makes us entirely forget them, producing the same effect as the waters of the River Lethe on those souls which were destined to enter ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... the swain stray Who is by thy beauties undone? To wash their remembrance away, To what distant Lethe must run? The wretch who is sentenced to die May escape, and leave justice behind; From his country perhaps he may fly, But oh! can he fly from ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... Infante," the interior of hell was shown. Here part of the stage opened, and discovered a scene underneath, representing several caves, full of infernal spirits, that flew about, discharging fire and smoke, on another side the river of Lethe and Charon's boat. Upon this landing a prodigious monster appeared, whose mouth opening to the great horror of the spectators, covered the front wings of the remaining part of the stage. Within his jaws was discovered a throne of fire, and a multitude ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... runs that here in Isis swim Such stately swans so confident in dying, That when they feel themselves near Lethe's brim, They sing their fatal dirge when death is nighing. And I like these that feel my wounds are mortal, Contented die for her whom I adore; And in my joyful hymns do still exhort all To die for such a saint or ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... death I'll touch the lyre, And to my soul the theme shall still belong. When, freed from clay, the flitting ghosts among, My spirit glides the Stygian shores around, Though the cold hand of death has sealed my tongue, Thy praise the infernal caverns shall rebound, And Lethe's sluggish waves ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... transfixed by Paris' coward hand. So I, too, by the banks of murmuring Hebrus followed the head of Orpheus that could not cease from song. So now must thou—out on the mad tyrant's crime!—go down untimely to the wave of Lethe, and while thou singest of war and with lofty strain givest comfort to the sepulchres of the mighty,—O infamy, O monstrous infamy!—art doomed to sudden silence.' So spake she, and with gleaming quill wiped away the tears ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... fault, 40 From all thy kindred books, To some dark cell or cave forlorn, Where thou endur'st, perhaps, The chafing of some hard untutor'd hand, Be comforted— For lo! again the splendid hope appears That thou may'st yet escape The gulphs of Lethe, and on oary wings Mount to the everlasting courts ...
— Poemata (William Cowper, trans.) • John Milton
... me about Dante's Hell—and Lethe. Two books in my childhood gave the outward and visible signs of that inward and spiritual interest in Death and the Life to Come which is one of the most vehement ones of childhood (and which breaks out QUITE as strongly in those who have been ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... of the waters of Lethe, how can he possibly look, now, in the face of, for instance, Fessenden of Maine, to whom he has said so many bitter things against the now belauded "Secretary Seward!" Bah! Chase most certainly must have a forty-or-fifty-diplomatist power ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... wings betwixt me and my care. These eyes, which seem in love with weeping, close! And make my senses for a time thy bower, That whilst I sleep I may my sorrows lose. I do not crave that thou the wand of power, Three times in Lethe dipp'd, at me shouldst shake, And all my senses sprinkle o'er and o'er; Let souls, more fortunate, thereof partake— Of languid rest a portion scant and slight, My weary, wandering eyes content will make. Now all the world ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... and Fancy grace, When grosser eyes are clos'd in sleep, The gentle spirits of the place 35 Waft up the insuperable steep, On whose vast summit broad and smooth Her nest the Phoenix Bird conceals, And where by cypresses o'erhung The heavenly Lethe steals. 40 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... schemes. For instance, the conception that man has returned into this life from anterior experiences of it is met by the opposing fact that he does not remember any preceding career. The explanatory idea is at once hit upon of a fountain of oblivion a river Lethe from which the disembodied soul drinks ere it reappears. Once establish in the popular imagination the conception of the Olympian synod of gods, and a thousand dramatic tales of action and adventure, appropriate ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... London ways where children weep,— Where girls whom none call maidens laugh, where gain, Hurrying men's steps, is yet by loss o'erta'en:— The bright Castalian brink and Latinos' steep:— Such were his paths, till deeper and more deep, He trod the sands of Lethe; and long pain, Weary with labour spurned and love found vain, In dead Rome's ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... of pleasure, we are often unconscious of pain while the devil amputates the fingers, the feet and hands, or even the arms and legs of our character. But oh, the anguish that visits the sad heart when the lethe passes away, and the soul becomes conscious of virtue sacrificed, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... many actions that we bitterly repent; still, in the most checkered life, I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon that I do not believe any mortal would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe if he had ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... said Septimius, "our identity would change in that repose; it would be a Lethe between the two parts of our being, and with such disconnection a continued life would be equivalent to a new one, and ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... sun, the awful stillness came stealing to envelope them; and with insistent fingers seemed to press upon the very drums of their ears. The little river flowed as stilly and darkly as the water of Lethe at their feet; and the gaunt pines over the way stood transfixed like souls that had drunk of it. Under the spell of the silence they instinctively lowered their voices; and they broke sticks for the fire with reluctance; so painful was the crash and reverberation ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... beautiful young man, who lies watched by angels beneath a heavy-curtained canopy. The genii of eternal repose modelled by Greek sculptors are twin-brothers of Love, on whom perpetual slumber has descended amid poppy-fields by Lethe's stream. The turmoil of the world is over for them; they will never wake again; they do not even dream. Sleep is the only power that still has life in them. But the Christian cannot thus conceive the mystery of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... passed through the Gates with the light and the cloud of his song, Dry-shod over Lethe he passed to the chasms of hell; And the hosts of the dead made mock at him, crying, How long Have we dwelt in the darkness, oh ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... children wildly crying; Women with faded eyes, all spent of tears; Men who have lived for love, yet lived alone; Yea, some consuming in cold fires of shame! O God, thou hast a work for all thy strength In saving these thy hearts with full content— Except thou give them Lethe's stream to drink, And that, my God, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald
... strenuous trump and drum, And shaped in squadron-strophes their desire, Live battle-odes whose lines were steel and fire: 10 Yet sometimes feathered words are strong, A gracious memory to buoy up and save From Lethe's dreamless ooze, the common grave Of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... always? Whether it is grave or gay, it takes me out into whirling winds, and tosses me in tempests. They call society gay here, and dizzying,—dance and music, show, excess, following each other; but it is all sleep, Lethe, in comparison with the mad world into which your music whirls me. Oh, stop a moment, Arnold! will you not stop? It is too ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and guile, To your destruction all his thoughts he bends, Yet if thou thirst of praise for noble stile, If in thy strength thou trust, thy strength that ends All hard assays, fly not, first with his blood Appease my ghost wandering by Lethe flood; ...
— Jerusalem Delivered • Torquato Tasso
... she keeps for ever behind me. 29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross] 30. Cagot and Cressida. 31. Lethe and Anapaula. 32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with Curious Eyes ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... musical parties. She was passionately fond of music; the Miss Falconers played on the piano-forte and sung, their brother John accompanied exquisitely on the flute, and the Marquis of Twickenham, who was dull as "the fat weed that grows on Lethe's brink," stood by—admiring. His proposal was made in form—and in form the young lady evaded it—in form her uncle, Lord Oldborough, told her that the thing must be, and proceeded directly to decide upon ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... for the young coffee-trees which remain sheltered from the sun and wind till sufficiently grown to transplant. To enter one of these "semilleros," as they are here called, at noon day, produces an effect like that anciently ascribed to the waters of Lethe. After sitting down upon the trunk of a fallen cedar or palm-tree, and breathing for a moment, the freshness of the air and the odour of the passion flower, which is one of the most abundant, and certainly the most beautiful of the ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... refers to the description of the House of Somnus, in Ovid's "Metamorphoses," 1. xi. 592, et seqq.; where the cave of Somnus is said to be "prope Cimmerios," ("near the Cimmerians") and "Saxo tamen exit ab imo Rivus aquae Lethes." ("A stream of Lethe's water issues from ...
— The Canterbury Tales and Other Poems • Geoffrey Chaucer
... clinging to the dark hair, Heaven knows how; every wild, quaint, bold, shy, pettish, madcap fancy had its illustration in a dress; and every fancy was as dead forgotten by its owner, in the tumult of merriment, as if the three old aqueducts that still remain entire had brought Lethe into Rome, upon their ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... artificial poisons conveyed by smells, has within these few weeks brought many persons of both sexes to an untimely fate; and, what is more surprising, has, contrary to her profession, with the same odours, revived others who had long since been drowned in the whirlpools of Lethe. Another of the professors is to be a certain lady, who is now publishing two of the choicest Saxon novels[6], which are said to have been in as great repute with the ladies of Queen Emma's Court, as the 'Memoirs from the New ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... And twilight lingers all the vale around. No watchful cocks Aurora's beams invite; No dogs nor geese, the guardians of the night: No flocks nor herds disturb the silent plains; Within the sacred walls mute quiet reigns, And murmuring Lethe soothing sleep invites; In dreams again the flying past delights: From milky flowers that near the cavern grow, Night ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... chiefs! to honour train'd, Who spread, when other methods fail'd, War's bloody banner, and prevail'd. Shall men like these unmention'd sleep Promiscuous with the common heap, And (Gratitude forbid the crime!) Be carried down the stream of time In shoals, unnoticed and forgot, On Lethe's stream, like flags, to rot? 200 No—they shall live, and each fair name, Recorded in the book of Fame, Founded on Honour's basis, fast As the round earth to ages last. Some virtues vanish with our breath; Virtue like this lives after death. Old Time himself, ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... surface was quite flat and smooth, save for innumerable tiny molehills or pyramids of mist. We seemed to be ploughing aimlessly through the phantasmal sand-dunes of another world, faintly and by an accident apprehended. So may the shades on a ghostly liner, plunging down Lethe, have an hour's chance glimpse of the lights and lives of Piccadilly, to them uncertain and filmy ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... cheeks with great gurgling kisses, which made one shudder and think involuntarily of the "slime which the aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile." Many of us have been Anglo-Indian babies. Was there a time when we suffered caresses such as these? What a happy thing it is that Lethe flows over us as we emerge from infancy, and blots out all that was before. Another question has been stirring in my mind since that scene. What feeling or motive prompted those luscious blandishments? Was it simple hypocrisy? I do not think so. The pure hypocrite ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... the nature of the place, and how the rivulet was the Lethe of Paradise;—Lethe, where he stood, but called Eunoe higher up; the drink of the one doing away all remembrance of evil deeds, and that of the other restoring all remembrance of good.[54] It was the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... heart bursting with despair. Everything in him seemed bursting—an agonising sensation—as his overstrained lungs collapsed, and the power of his strong limbs failed him; then everything seemed to break away and let in the floods of Lethe with a rush—confusion and forgetfulness and a whirl of dreams, settling to a strange peace, an irresistible sleep, as if he had swallowed a magic opiate. The sea took him, as a nurse takes a helpless child, and floated him up from the place ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... people, except to the man of science; and even he very soon gets to that "ass's bridge," on the other side of which Nature, as the genius of occult things, stands with a satirical smile on her face, as she sees the proud savans toppling over into the Lethe of sheer ignorance, and getting drowned for their insane curiosity. In the asylum in France, mentioned by De Vayer, the inmates enjoyed exceedingly the imputed madness of the visiting physician. The same play is acted in the ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... the same, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, Despite his shop, his trade, his cash, The wretch who knows not ven'son hash, Living, shall forfeit civic fame, And dying, shall descend with shame, In double death, to Lethe's pools, Despis'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... found in every suburb, creating wonder in all thoughtful minds as to who can be their tens of thousands of occupants. The houses are a little too good for artisans, too small and too silent to be the abode of various lodgers, and too mean for clerks who live on salaries. They are as dull-looking as Lethe itself, dull and silent, dingy and repulsive. But they are not discreditable in appearance, and never have that Mohawk look which by some unknown sympathy in bricks and mortar attaches itself to the ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... bustle has a charm to wake a mummy's ear Who, ere the Pyramids were planned, was mustered charioteer; And many a horseman's spirit thrills by Lethe's drowsy brink When in a strange, familiar dream his Troop comes down ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 12, 1917 • Various
... Sad Acheron of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud Heard on the ruful stream; fierce Phlegeton 580 Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage. Farr off from these a slow and silent stream, Lethe the River of Oblivion roules Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets, Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Beyond this flood a frozen Continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... with every breath we draw, an ethereal stream of Lethe runs through our whole being, so that we have but a partial recollection of our joys, and scarcely any of our sorrows. I have always known how to value, and use, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IX. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... "It is Lethe," she said obstinately, "and you shall not deny it to me. I tell you I am weary of my thoughts, and all the business of this River of yours. I have gained the bank; it is philosophy. Before I am driven ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... thee apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,[105] Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear: 'Tis given out that, sleeping in mine orchard,[106] A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process[107] of my death Rankly abus'd: but know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did sting thy father's life ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... "Master, where are Phlegethon and Lethe found, for of the one thou art silent, and of the other thou sayest that it is formed by ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... may roll on, hand wax weak, and heart grow old, but never till both are cold can I forget thee! I would not; for thee would I remember. Not for all the world would I bathe my soul in the waters of Lethe. Blessed be memory ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... reed-bed with my kind, Rooted in Lethe-bank, when at the dawn There came a groping shape of mystery Moving among us, that with random stroke Severed, and rapt me from my silent tribe, Pierced, fashioned, lipped me, sounding for a voice, Laughing on Lethe-bank—and in my throat I felt the wing-beat of the fledgeling notes, The bubble of ...
— Artemis to Actaeon and Other Worlds • Edith Wharton
... throbbing throat's long, long melodious moan. I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes, Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks, And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart, Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art! Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?" Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired: "Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired! Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise, Telling me only where my nymph is fled,— Where she ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... height, the ceiling in most parts is not more than thirty feet from the ground. In the centre of one cavern, a regular hill rises from the ground, with a stream running at its base. Several rivers are crossed in this vast cavern, one is called the Echo River, another the Styx, and a third the Lethe. They are inhabited by fish and crawfish, ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... it without reason that Dante symbolised in her the love of Holy Church; though students of the 'Purgatory' will hardly recognise the lovely maiden, singing and plucking flowers beside the stream of Lethe, in the stern and warlike chatelaine of Canossa. Unfortunately we know but little of Matilda's personal appearance. Her health was not strong; and it is said to have been weakened, especially in ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... aching gratefully in many joints, I had plunged into the hammock's Lethe, swooning shamelessly to a benign oblivion. Dreamless it must long have been, for the shadows of ranch house, stable, hay barn, corral, and bunk house were long to the east when next I observed them. But I fought to this wakefulness through ...
— Somewhere in Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson
... That night he learned how silence best can speak The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin. About the middle of the night her call Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed. 'Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!' she said. Lethe had passed those lips, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for winter come. No singing bird, Nor harvest field, is near the path I tread; An empty husk is all I have to keep. The largess of my giving left me bare, And I ask God but for His Lethe—sleep. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... acquiescence passes into hope, as the survivor of that union "which conquers Time indeed, and is eternal, separate from fears," prays Sabinus, if it be permitted, not even among the dead to let the severing water of Lethe pass his lips.[51] ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... words bear witness to the keenness of his insight into the maladies of his own people and the sources of social and political strength enjoyed by the United States, where he had recently sojourned. Referring to their speedy recovery from the tumults of their revolution, he said: "The true Lethe after passing through a revolution is to be found in the opening out to men of every avenue of hope.—Revolutions leave behind them a general restlessness of mind, a need of movement." That need was met in America by man's warfare against ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... mute, To angry gods the scorn and prey, But tasted of the charmed fruit, And cast despair itself away; So, while unto thy lips, its shore, This stream of life enchanted flows, Remember'd grief, that stung before, Sinks down to Lethe's calm repose. So, while unto thy lips, its shore, The stream of life enchanted flows— Drown'd deep in Lethe's calm repose, The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... carried thither originally from China, seems to thrive particularly well in this part of the world; the little pug dog, or Dutch mastiff, which our English ladies were once so fond of, that poor Garrick thought it worth his while to ridicule them for it in the famous dramatic satire called Lethe, has quitted London for Padua, I perceive; where he is restored happily to his former honours, and every carriage I meet here has a pug in it. That breed of dogs is now so near extirpated among us, that I recoiled: only Lord Penryn who possesses such an animal; ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... I heap it with the weed From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore And cast upon Virginia's shore, I'll think,—So fill the fairer bowl And wise alembic of thy soul, With herbs far-sought that shall distil, Not fumes to slacken thought and will, ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... harries Is love of the Best; Yawns the pit of the Dragon Lit by rays from the Blest. The Lethe of nature Can't trance him again, Whose soul sees the Perfect His eyes seek ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... meeting in another world; For thou hast drunk thy passport out of this. Not the Nonacrian font, nor Lethe's lake, Could sooner numb thy nimble faculties, Than this, ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... feel her cool and dewy fingers press My mortal-fevered brow, while in my heart She poured with tender love Her healing Lethe-balm! ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various
... unconscious fervor, . . why, why could he not take this dear companion away out of possible peril? ... away to those far lands dimly remembered, yet now so completely lost sight of, that they seemed to him but as a delusive mirage faintly discerned above the rising waters of Lethe! Sighing deeply, he controlled his emotion and forced himself to speak calmly though his ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... the most intimate correspondence at Bath or Tunbridge, shall in four-and-twenty hours so totally forget their friendship, as to meet in St. James's Park, without betraying the least token of recognition; so that one would imagine these mineral waters were so many streams issuing from the river Lethe, so famed of old for washing away all traces of memory ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... Lethe," observed King Pluto. "Is it not a very pleasant stream?" "I think it a very dismal one," said Proserpina. "It suits my taste, however," answered Pluto, who was apt to be sullen when anybody disagreed with him. "At all events, its water has one very excellent quality; for a single draught of it ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... and reducing to one volume from two (more meo), a trashy Book, 'Bernard's Recollections of the Stage,' with some good recollections of the Old Actors, up to Macklin and Garrick. But, of all people's, one can't trust Actors' Stories. In 'Lethe,' where your Garrick figures in Sir Geoffrey, also figured Woodward, as 'The Fine Gentleman'; so I think, at least, is the Title of a very capital mezzotint I have of him ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... dumb, Dread Cumae wafts no words of fate, To fright the eager souls that press Through sullen Lethe's iron gate. ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... on the water." He pulled the rude shallop to her feet and they got in and went on, Jack not heeding her gibe. "These brackish, threatening deeps remind me of all sorts of weird and uncanny things; Stygian pools—Lethe—what not mystic and terrifying. See, the tiny waves that curl before our boat are like thin ink; a thousand roots and herbs and who knows what mysterious vegetable mixture colors these dark deeps? I could fancy ...
— The Iron Game - A Tale of the War • Henry Francis Keenan
... of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... and Night, Hie away; and aim thy flight Where consort none other fowl Than the bat and sullen owl; Where upon the limber grass Poppy and mandragoras With like simples not a few Hang for ever drops of dew. Where flows Lethe without coil Softly like a stream of oil. Hie thee thither, gentle Sleep: With this Greek no longer keep. Thrice I charge thee by my wand; Thrice with moly from my hand Do I touch Ulysses' eyes, And with the jaspis: ...
— Pastoral Poems by Nicholas Breton, - Selected Poetry by George Wither, and - Pastoral Poetry by William Browne (of Tavistock) • Nicholas Breton, George Wither, William Browne (of Tavistock)
... not for her. Death and sleep were all she could hope for; but she must not even hope for them. She must do what was right, and be true to herself, advienne que pourra. And perhaps some angel would give her oblivion or let her drink of Lethe, though she should never reach those waters beyond ...
— Beyond The Rocks - A Love Story • Elinor Glyn
... Liberty with more Joy, and with more lingering expectation, than I do to my escape from this maternal bondage, and this accursed place, which is the region of dullness itself, and more stupid than the banks of Lethe, though it possesses contrary qualities to the river of oblivion, as the detested scenes I now witness, make me regret the happier ones already passed, and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... aqueducts of story As the mists of Lethe throng Croton's waves in all their glory Troop in ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... have acquired goodness will take upon them human form"; and Virgil says: "After death, the souls come to the Elysian fields, or to Tartarus, and there meet with the reward or punishment of their deeds during life. Later, on drinking of the waters of Lethe, which takes away all memory of the past, they return to earth." But it must be admitted that Rome was deficient in spiritual insight and beliefs, on the whole, her material successes having diverted her attention from the problems which had so engrossed ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... together, so far captivates the spectator, as to make him unmindful of every kind of violation of Time, Place, or Existence. As at the first appearance of the Ghost of Hamlet, "his ear must be dull as the fat weed, which roots itself on Lethe's brink," who can attend to the improbablity of the exhibition. So in many scenes of the Tempest we perpetually believe the action passing before our eyes, and relapse with somewhat of distaste into common life at the ...
— The Botanic Garden. Part II. - Containing The Loves of the Plants. A Poem. - With Philosophical Notes. • Erasmus Darwin
... finds birth, this merry, roaring brook, in a dark, mysterious, shadowy pool, overhung by wild fantastic masses of rock, which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the mighty waters of the creation. What a type of the poet's own genius—nourished deep down under ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... bright with a merry light And the music of long ago; And others dark as Lethe's night And as cold as the winter's snow. Hands that meet mine in a trusty clasp With blushes that come and go, Strangers to pain in this world so vast, With its pleasure now and sorrow at last, In the land we ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... regularly relieved. Yet drowsiness being incidental to all natures, even to Napoleon, beside his own sentry napping in the snowy bivouac; so, often, in snowy moonlight, or ebon eclipse, dozed Mark, our harpooneer. Lethe be his portion this blessed night, thought I, as during the morning which preceded our enterprise, I eyed the man who ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... unknown. In 1686, when Regnard became an author, the Voitures, Balzacs, and Benserades, the men of fantastic conceits, the vanguard of the grand army of French wits, had marched away to Pluto and to Lethe. One or two stragglers, like Menage and Chapelle, lingered to wonder at the complete change of taste. The age had ripened fast. Not many years before, Barbin the bookseller ordered his hacks to faire du St. Evremond. St. Evremond ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... but not in time, as Willis complained, to keep him from going down to posterity astride the finis to Pericles and Aspasia. Long afterwards he expressed his hope that Landor's biographers would either let him slip off at Lethe's wharf, or else do him justice in a note. Before this unfortunate incident, Landor and Willis had corresponded on cordial terms. The old poet wrote to say how much he envied his correspondent the evenings he passed in the society of 'the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... paile of water, By the sad sweet springs that have salved our sorrow, The fates that haunt us, the grief that grips— Where we walk not to-day nor shall walk not tomorrow The wells of Lethe for wearied lips. With souls nor shaken with tears nor laughter, With limp knees loosed as of priests that pray, We bowed us and bent to the white well-water, We dipped and we ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... duller should'st thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe wharf, Would'st thou not stir ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... vol. viii., p. 40-46) declared the version eloignee du gout Orientale; yet he re-translated the tales from the original Arabic (Continues, Paris, 1806), and in this he was followed by Gauttier, while Southey borrowed the idea of his beautiful romance, "Thalaba the Destroyer," now in Lethe from the "History of Maughraby." Mr. A. G. Ellis considers these tales as good as the old "Arabian Nights," and my friend Mr. W. F. Kirby (Appendix to The Nights, vol. x. p. 418), quite agrees with him that Chavis and Cazotte's Continuation is well worthy ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... and gone, tho' the lamps upon Their face as aforetime gleamed: And his head sunk down, and a Lethe crept O'er his powerful brain, and ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... gran'pa, he come and got them all to come. My gran'pa's name was Harvey Barnett. His old master's son had married and he had been staying with him. That made him be on another place. There was a good many of the children in my grandmother's family. Mama had a sister named Lucy, one named Lethe, one named Caroline, one named Annie, and one named Jane. She had two boys—one named Jack, and one named Barnett. She had another sister ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... to the last are there no dreams of the future? Have you no such dreams at this moment? and without the romance of such dreams, would there be any reality to human life which could distinguish it from the life of the weed that rots on Lethe?" ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... at any mortal thing, 'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'T is that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring, Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep: Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; A mortal mother ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... days of our own before us, Siegmund!' she scolded. 'The mist is Lethe. It is enough for us if its ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... did not go down in order that he might chain the three necks, shaggy with serpents, of the monster begotten of Medusa. His business also is settled for all time; he is the terrible, fearless, and watchful janitor, or guardian (janitor or custos) of Orcus, the Styx, Lethe, or the black Kingdom.[9] And so he remains for modern poets, as when ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... water going slowly was audible. A few minutes of walking brought them to its banks. The stream flowed greasily and dark, some forty yards wide, but in the middle it forked about a spit of sand not more than ten paces broad. It was a very Lethe of a river, running oilily and with a slumberous sound, and its reputation for ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... visionnaire (perhaps that also), at least a lover of visions, and of Isaiah and Ezekiel and the Revelation. Dante, Blake, Shelley, the best of Lamennais and the best of Hugo excite in me nothing but a passionate reverence. I can walk day-long and night-long by Ulai and Chebar and Lethe-Eunoe and have no thought of sneer or slumber, shrug or satiety. But when you ask me to be agitated at Count Albert of Rudolstadt's violin ventriloquising Satan I really must decline. I do even remember the poor creature Paul de Kock, and would fain turn to ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... once tasted the Lethe of Cherbourg, remained in Paris until the last minute, and stepped from the boat-train to the waiting tender. But the less well-informed came on the day before—and never, for the remainder of their lives, forgot the dulness of their last day in Europe. Then there were the nervously-anxious, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... call." It is no small thing, in this grim world, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, to render all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in a chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way, why, the call should be clear! The Penguin Person should have no doubt or shame of his vocation, nor should anyone else allow him to. Little Joe Weber, who was on the stage the most perfect example of Penguinity, was as a stage character beloved ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... "Yes, Lethe," smiled Wiesike. "It's a pity that while the ancient Swedes, the Greeks, were leaving us the name they did not leave ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... one is a staid and orthodox divine; one a rising barrister; a third a respectable country gentleman, justice of the peace, "and quorum;" a fourth, they tell me, a semi Papist, but set us all down together in that same room, draw the champagne corks, and let some Lethe (the said champagne, if you please) wash out all that has passed over us in the last five years, and my word on it, three out of four of us are but boys still; and though much shaving, pearl powder, and carmine, might fail to make of any of the party a heroine of any more delicate ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 54, No. 338, December 1843 • Various
... living who would give their own weight in sovereigns, though drawing against thirteen to sixteen stone, that all of this dreadful subject might be swallowed up by Lethe; that darkness might settle for ever upon the insanities of Cabool; and the grave close finally over the carnage of Tezeen. But it will not be. Blood will have blood, they say. The madness which could sport in levity with a trust of seventeen thousand lives, walks ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... no dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose; nor call to you, through your casement,—call (not giving you the name of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy Lethe, stood wreathing flowers with ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... our arms we straight do fly, And forthwith march away; Few towns or cities we come nigh Good liquor us deny; In Lethe deep our woes we steep - Our loves forgotten be, Amongst the jovialst we sing, ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... with a whip at his back, To the deep Tantalian flood; In Lethe profound let envy be drown'd, That pines at another man's good; Let Sorrow's expense be banded from hence, All payments have greater delay, We'll spend the long nights in cheerful delights To drive the ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... Lethe than anything else," said young Jack, pointing to the silent water below. "If we remain here long, we shall forget all that has gone before, you may be sure. This is the place to drive us out of our wits more than any ...
— Jack Harkaway and his son's Escape From the Brigand's of Greece • Bracebridge Hemyng
... mind is unchristian, for it has no day of rest. Generally I think that my disease has its seat in the abdomen or in the waist. Mineral waters I can no more drink this summer. But is there not a mineral water which is called Lethe? ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... the moment Vane was faced with the latter. The doctor had talked airily of three or four months, and after that in all probability a spell of light duty, and to Vane that seemed like a permanency. It is one thing to drug oneself in the waters of Lethe for a fortnight of one's own free will: it is altogether different to be drugged by others for good. And dimly he felt that either he or they would have to go under. Two totally incompatible people cannot sit next one another at dinner for long without ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... in the humor to dare the impossible; dare through sheer irritability of heart—not mind. And so she saddled Lethe—an unregenerate pinto of the Southern Trail, whose concealed devilishness forcibly reminded one of Balzac's famous description: "A clenched fist hidden in an ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... the tiller, nor his hold Relaxed, nor ever from the stars withdrew His steadfast eyes, still watchful when behold! A slumberous bough the god revealed to view, Thrice dipt in Styx, and drenched with Lethe's dew. Then, lightly sprinkling, o'er the pilot's brows The drowsy dewdrops from the leaves he threw. Dim grow his eyes; the languor of repose Steals o'er his faltering sense, the ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... Even all I have; ay, and myself and all Will I withal endow a child of thine; So in the Lethe of thy angry soul Thou drown the sad remembrance of those wrongs Which thou supposest I ...
— The Life and Death of King Richard III • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... rumour's tale), Faced with a rude financial deadlock, Is bent on mulcting every male Who shirks the privilege of wedlock; With such a hurt Time cannot deal, And Lethe here affords no tonic; Nothing but Death can hope to heal What looks as if it must ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... futilely through fields of scentless asphodel, and through tall sullen groves of myrtle,—the puzzled quiet dead, who may not even weep as I do now, but can only wonder what it is that they regret. And I too must taste of Lethe, and forget all ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not for the ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various |
