"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... orchard plains, Loire locked her embracing dead in silent sands; dark with blood rolled Iser; glacial-pale, Beresina-Lethe, by whose shore the weary hearts forgot their people, and their ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... along the shallows of the world, And vile hands gather it? My song shall rise, Although none heed or hear it: rise it shall, And swell along the wastes of Nineveh And Babylon, until it reach to thee, Layard! who raisest cities from the dust, Who driest Lethe up amid her shades, And pourest a fresh stream on arid sands, And rescuest thrones and nations, fanes and gods, From conquering Time: he sees thee, and turns back. The weak and slow Power pushes past the wise, And lifts them up in triumph to her ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... of Trophonius 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 ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... again to meet! Till then I fain would sleep; My longings and my thoughts to steep In Lethe's waters dark and deep. My loved one I again shall see, There's rapture in the thought! In the hope tomorrow of thee, My ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... of story, As the mists of Lethe throng, Croton's waves in all their glory Troop in melody along. Ever sparkling, bright, and single, Will this rock-ribbed stream appear, When posterity shall mingle Like the gathered ...
— Poems • George P. Morris
... the quarter-deck until 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 might possibly cross ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... 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 thy happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of Summer ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... has been, in this respect, neither an allegorist nor an imitator; and, consequently, he alone has introduced the ancient fictions with effect. His Minos, his Charon, his Pluto, are absolutely terrific. Nothing can be more beautiful or original than the use which he has made of the River of Lethe. He has never assigned to his mythological characters any functions inconsistent with the creed of the Catholic Church. He has related nothing concerning them which a good Christian of that age might not believe possible. On this account there is nothing in these ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... invite 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 ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... fulfil them," said she, with flashing eyes. "Sire, I will go to fulfil mine; but I am weak, and have yet one more favor to ask. There is no cup of Lethe from which men drink forgetfulness, and yet I must forget. I must cast a veil over the past. Help me, sire—I must leave Berlin! Banish my husband to another city. It will be an open grave for me; but I will struggle to plant that grave with flowers, whose beauty and perfume shall ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... barbarous laws; These were the rough ways of the world till now. Henceforth thou hast a helper, me, that know The woman's cause is man's: they rise or sink Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free: For she that out of Lethe scales with man The shining steps of Nature, shares with man His nights, his days, moves with him to one goal, Stays all the fair young planet in her hands— If she be small, slight-natured, miserable, How shall men grow? but work no more alone! Our ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... than leaving it to settle on that of the Confederation. I beg of your Majesty to let me know in Paris your opinion on all those points. Can the waters of the Danube have acquired the property of the river Lethe?" ...
— Worlds Best Histories - France Vol 7 • M. Guizot and Madame Guizot De Witt
... 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
... 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 ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the opposite shore we see the dark walls of Fuenterrabia, domineered by the castle. The railway whistle begins to seem a memory of another existence, the bustle of travel a thing remote. The quiet of the river, unlike Lethe, turns us to the past, and clouds the present ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... overtaking me than I then could imagine. Perhaps I was half conscious at last of a tremulous voice hailing the main-royal-yard from the top. But if so, the consciousness glided away from me, and left me in Lethe. But when, like lightning, the yard dropped under me, and instinctively I clung with both hands to the "tie," then I came to myself with a rush, and felt something like a choking hand at my throat. For an ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... tormented with unquenchable thirst; Sisyphus despairingly labouring at his ever-descending stone. Warned by such examples, we may learn not to contemn the gods. Beyond these sad scenes, extending far to the right, are the plains of pleasure, the Elysian Fields; and Lethe, the river of oblivion, of which whoever tastes, though he should ascend to the eastern boundary of the earth, and return again to life and day, forgets whatever he ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... past eternity, But Lethe's murmur stills its roar, The one vague truth that reaches thee Is this—that ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... 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 ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... deplore, and with 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
... 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
... no interest about insane 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. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... becomes in substance luminous—all light—so that it is penetrated within the affection and conception. This is not immediately, at the beginning of generation, when the soul comes forth fresh from the intoxication of Lethe, and drenched with the waves of forgetfulness and confusion, so that the spirit comes into captivity to the body, and is put into the condition of growth; but little by little, it goes on digesting, so as to become fitted for the action of the sensitive faculty, until, through the rational ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... was from Spain that the Emperor warned the princes composing the Confederation of the Rhine to have their contingents ready. His language is guarded—whether the cabinet of Vienna had drunk from the waters of Lethe or from those of the Danube, he himself would be ready. Besides, his actions could have but one meaning. The moment he reached Paris, significant looks and conduct warned Talleyrand to beware. "Is Joseph," the ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... tell you how long after, I awoke and found myself in a strange-looking room, filled with strange objects, not the least strange of which was the thing that seemed myself. At first I looked with vague and motionless curiosity out of the Lethe from which my mind slowly emerged; painless, and at peace; listlessly questioning whether I was alive or dead,—whether the limp weight lying in bed there was my body,—the meaning of the silence and the closed curtains. Then, with a succession of painful flashes, as if the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... was much encouraged by the subterranean nature of the mines which he caused to be worked. He thinks that the river Tartarus, so famed in the realms of Pluto, was no other than the Tartessa, or Guadalquivir of the present day, which runs through the centre of Spain. Lethe, too, he thinks to have been the Guadalaviar, in the same country. Pluto, he suggests, had heard of the beauty of Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, queen of Sicily, and carried her thence, which gave rise to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... they are lulled by 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
... is in this? How runs the streame? Or I am mad, or else this is a dreame: Let fancie still my sense in Lethe steepe, If it be thus to dreame, still let ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... 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; ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... 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
... 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
... inspired Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to the first of May; the air, which, in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens to that of the golden age,—to that which gives motion to the funereal cypresses on the banks of Lethe;—to the air which is to salute beatified spirits when expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting influence most frequently intervene;—the atmosphere seems refined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... best with the heavily laden trio of boats. Cameron established himself—compass, log, lead, and dredge—in the steamer stern. His admirable geographical labours in 'Crossing Africa' are, after a few years of a swift-moving age, lapsing Lethe-wards; and ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... behind him by Izanagi and its conversion into a thicket are common incidents of ancient folk-lore, while in the context of this Kami's ablutions on his return from hades, it may be noted that Ovid makes Juno undergo lustration after a visit to the lower regions and that Dante is washed in Lethe when he passes out of purgatory. Nor is there any great stretch of imagination needed to detect a likeness between the feathered messenger sent from the Ark and the three envoys—the last a bird—despatched from the "plain of high heaven" ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... tho' the lamps upon Their face as aforetime gleamed: And his head sunk down, and a Lethe crept O'er his powerful brain, ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... apt But duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf, Wouldst ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... 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 him and bring ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... 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
... his memory: he had drifted out of coarse, measured life into some out-coast of eternity, and slept in its calm. When, by long degrees, the shock of outer life jarred and woke him, it was feebly done: he came back reluctant, weak: the quiet clinging to him, as if he had been drowned in Lethe, and had brought its calming mist with him out ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... Parlementaire).) Unfortunate Doctor! For two-and-twenty years he, unguillotined, shall near nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine; then dying, shall through long centuries wander, as it were, a disconsolate ghost, on the wrong side of Styx and Lethe; his name like ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... went merrily on our way, driving the small sandpiper from rock to rock before us, and sometimes rowing near enough to a cottage on the bank, though they were few and far between, to see the sunflowers, and the seed vessels of the poppy, like small goblets filled with the water of Lethe, before the door, but without disturbing the sluggish household behind. Thus we held on, sailing or dipping our way along with the paddle up this broad river, smooth and placid, flowing over concealed rocks, where ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... time spreads over the wrongs, wounds, and afflictions of others, in the mind of the person who inflicts those wrongs and oppressions! The oppressor soon forgets. This robbery took place in 17[81]; it was in the year 1783 when he asserted that the waters of Lethe had been poured over all their wrongs and oppressions. Your Lordships will mark this insulting language, when he says that both the order of the Directors and the application of the Begums for redress must be solicitations ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... die. Lethe was only a fable of the olden times. A place of safety is not always a place of freedom from pain. It could not be so in this instance. Yet, for a time, like the exhausted prisoner borne back from torture to his cell, the crushed ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... world-experience, calling into vague, drowsy, fluttering response things that would later awaken to full life, and reanimating the dim and beautiful instincts that are an heritage of that time when the soul is passing the lethe of earliest childhood and retains still a wavering iridescence of the glory from which it has come. The question rose to his lips ready for the asking. He wanted to turn track on the instant, to call for Celia, to demand of her the ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... or at a girl in dusty orange filling a goatskin pitcher at a well beneath a palm tree, and she succumbed to the lulling influence, smiling as they smile who hear the gentle ripple of the waters of Lethe. ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... 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 of ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... 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. ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... prodigious waste of letters has time made! What a number have here dropped off, and left the poor surviving seven unattended! For my own part, four are all I have to take care of; and I'll be judged by you, if any man could live in less compass. Well, for the future, I'll drown all high thoughts in the Lethe of cowslip-wine; as for fame, renown, reputation, take 'em, critics! If ever I seek for immortality here, may I be damn'd, for there's not much danger ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 21, July, 1859 • Various
... 1829.] at Dr. Beddoes', who has applied himself much to chemistry, has made some discoveries of importance, and enthusiastically expects wonders will be performed by the use of certain gases, which inebriate in the most delightful manner, having the oblivious effects of Lethe, and at the same time giving the rapturous sensations of the Nectar of the Gods! Pleasure even to madness is the consequence of this draught. But faith, great faith, is I believe necessary to produce any effect upon the drinkers, and I have seen some of the adventurous ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... lot Of mortals lies in Lethe's wave; Yet some shall never be forgot, Some shall exist beyond ...
— Byron's Poetical Works, Vol. 1 • Byron
... 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 as ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... possible to avoid the throes of labor, and have children without suffering? This is a question which science answers in the affirmative. Medical art brings the waters of Lethe to the bedside of woman in her hour of trial. Of late years chloroform and ether have been employed to lessen or annul the pains of childbirth, with the same success that has attended their use in surgery. Their administration is never pushed so as to produce complete unconsciousness, ...
— The Physical Life of Woman: - Advice to the Maiden, Wife and Mother • Dr. George H Napheys
... 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 ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... 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 ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... on! I would not waken yet, Or leave too soon the peaceful realm of dreams! There, lulled by placid Lethe, I forget The tumult raging on Earth's roaring streams; Doubt not that, later, I shall surely meet With steadfast soul Day's ceaseless, sordid strife, But now I crave again that ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... 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 ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... threshold, that the intense light of that moment may illumine the soul's past unworthiness, and touch it with a remorse deeper than all the horrors of hell could awaken. The anguish purifies, and wins the boon of a Lethe in which the past wrong is absolutely forgotten. Then comes the full fruition, and the mated souls traverse a Paradise which still is dearest to Dante as he watches its reflection in the ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... 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 region, she said, in which ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... have worshipped. The ice congealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like a thing ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... past Elysium, past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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; ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... flowers of every varied tint Fill all the air with odors rich and sweet; And many fruits, suited to every taste, Hang ripe and ready that who will may eat— A world of life, with all its lights and shades, The bright original of our sad world Without its sin and storms, its thorns and tears. No Lethe's sluggish waters lave its shores, Nor solemn shades, of poet's fancy bred, Sit idly here to boast of battles past, Nor wailing ghosts wring here their shadowy hands For lack of honor to their cast-off dust; But living men, in human bodies clothed— Not bodies ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... 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
... He, who waits at your feet and implores acceptance, might not be so miserable after all, as he and you imagine, should you decline his overtures. In the cares of a busy world, he may find a draught of the waters of Lethe. His affections,—if it be a pure and deep love that impels him, and not insanity or mental intoxication,—may be turned into other channels, and the remnant of his life prove, after all, an endurable evil. He may be directed ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... nurseries 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 ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... 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
... trespassing on your kindness, but I have only a few more words to say. The ancients had a beautiful fable about the water of Lethe, in which the soul that was bathed straightway forgot all that was sad and evil in its previous life; the most stained, disgraced, and mournful of souls coming forth fresh, blithe, and bright as ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... I heard of work intruding itself, in a letter twitting me for a broken promise in not joining him: "We are reasonably jolly, but rurally so; going to bed o' nights at ten, and bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him, Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and pensiveness ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... the long days to come, when, forgetting and forgotten, he might find a new life among these simple aliens, themselves forgotten by the world. He had thought of this once before in the garden; it occurred to him again in this Lethe-like oblivion of the little church, in the kindly pressure of the priest's hand. The ornaments no longer looked uncouth and barbaric—rather they seemed full of some new spiritual significance. He suddenly ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... of Somnus and god of sleep and dreams, who sprinkled the dew of sleep on the brow of mortals from his horn or wings or from a bough dipped in Lethe. ...
— Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book I • Edmund Spenser
... 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... 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
... and 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 where he had been savagely groping; ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... for — of the things that must be gained and the things that must be lost before that 'for ever' rest could in any sort be looked forward to, — and dismissing the thought, Elizabeth blessed her fragrant moss pillow of Lethe and ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... and night, Hie away; and aim thy flight Where consort none other fowl Than the bat and sullen owl; Where upon thy limber grass, Poppy and mandragoras, With like simples not a few, Hang forever drops of dew; Where flows Lethe without coil Softly like a stream of oil. Hie thee hither, 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's eyes, And with the jaspis: then arise, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... waywardness and intrigue, without staining our pages with a full relation of their heartless conduct, since to have revived the now forgotten tales might have given additional pain to some beauteous victims whose fair names have dropped into Lethe's waters, like early spring flowers nipped by the lingering hand of slow-paced winter; or, in other instances, have disturbed the repose of an unsuspecting husband, or have stung the aged heart of a doting parent—evils we could not have avoided, had we determined upon rehearsing the ...
— The English Spy • Bernard Blackmantle
... forth thy blood, It would become me better than to close In terms of friendship with thine enemies. Pardon me, Julius! Here wast thou bay'd, brave hart; 205 Here didst thou fall, and here thy hunters stand, Sign'd in thy spoil and crimson'd in thy lethe. O world, thou wast the forest to this hart; And this, indeed, O world, the heart of thee. How like a deer, strucken by many princes, 210 ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... time and oft had Harold loved, Or dreamed he loved, since rapture is a dream; But now his wayward bosom was unmoved, For not yet had he drunk of Lethe's stream: And lately had he learned with truth to deem Love has no gift so grateful as his wings: How fair, how young, how soft soe'er he seem, Full from the fount of joy's delicious springs Some bitter o'er the flowers its ...
— Childe Harold's Pilgrimage • Lord Byron
... you have always a merry wit. But, indeed, the boy is a brave boy, and a quick boy, Sir Richard, but more forgetful than Lethe; and—sapienti loquor—it were well if he were away, for I shall never see him again without my head aching. Moreover, he put my son Jack upon the fire last Wednesday, as you would put a football, though he is a year older, your worship, because, he said, he looked so ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Moliere was almost 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. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... brief space, and kindly interpose Thy soothing 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
... hollow dale meanwhile AEneas sees A secret grove, a thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees, And Lethe's stream that all along that quiet place doth wend; O'er which there hovered countless folks and peoples without end: And as when bees amid the fields in summer-tide the bright Settle on diverse flowery things, and round the lilies white Go streaming; ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... forgotten they would be everlastingly re-discovered and re-read. It is a monotonous memory which keeps us in the main from seeing things as splendid as they are. The ancients were not wrong when they made Lethe the boundary of a better land; perhaps the only flaw in their system is that a man who had bathed in the river of forgetfulness would be as likely as not to climb back upon the bank of the earth and fancy himself ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only Lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant. Fresh air, with its oxygen and its ozone, being lacking, a man supplies the want with ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... themselves with water as usual; but it was the water of the Fountain of Youth; the ladies sipped Nepenthe; the lovelorn, the careworn, and the sorrow-stricken were supplied with brimming goblets of Lethe; and it was shrewdly conjectured that a certain golden vase, from which only the more distinguished guests were invited to partake, contained nectar that had been mellowing ever since the days of classical mythology. The ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... strange transitory life was one the slave of these small cares? What if even in that dark pit beneath, which seemed to whisper Lethe to the tumultuous, swirling waters—what if there, too, were merely a beginning again, and to seek a slumbering refuge there merely a blind and reiterated plunge into the heat and tumult of another day? Who was that poor, dark, homeless ghoul, Sabathier? ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... now o'er paths of roses, Glorious shape of light, she sweeps, Tow'rd the shadow-peopled valley Where the sacred Lethe sleeps; Thither drawn by magic suasion, As by gentle spirits led, Fain she sees the silver billows, And their flowery ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... utmost extremity; science had perfected its instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would tinkle—the watcher would be laughing out of earshot—and the life would sink back into Lethe after swimming ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... of a Baptist minister. He comes from East Lethe, New York State, and was working his way through college—waiting at White Mountain hotels in summer—when Archie Lanfear ran across him. There were eight children in the family, and the mother was an invalid. Dredge never had a penny from his father after he was fourteen; but his mother wanted ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... 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; ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... of the 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 ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... Months has followed me up and down? Her face I cannot see, for 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 ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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; ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... have left behind. Each in its day had been a throbbing, vital thing, and though at times he found the past obtrusive and wished to throw it off, he could never utterly do so. There was for him no Lethe. But if he tasted the disadvantages of so compound a self, to others the array enriched the man, making him vibrant of all that had been as well as all that was. It put them, too, to speculation as to how great an army he would gather ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... from Lethe's stream could not blot from the remembrance of the race the deed of that Republican leader enthroned upon the seat of government, the deed of the immortal Lincoln, whose birth we commemorate here to-night, the deed of that second Abraham who, true to his ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... beheld in vain: Like Tantalus, who in the realms below Sees blushing fruits, which to increase his pain, When he attempts to eat, his taste forego. O Venus! give me more, or let me drink Of Lethe's ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... it can. The old Greeks were pressed with that difficulty: they said to themselves, If a man remembers, there can be no Elysium for him. And so they put the river of forgetfulness, the waters of Lethe, betwixt life and the happy plains. Ah, we do not want any river of oblivion betwixt us and everlasting blessedness. Calvary is on this side, and that is enough! Certainly it is one of the most blessed things about 'the faith that is in Christ Jesus,' that it makes a man ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... many questions, stranger! 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
... to humor the old man's fancy. He had not told us a story for some time; and the dark and solemn swamp around us; the amber-colored stream flowing silently and sluggishly at our feet, like the waters of Lethe; the heavy, aromatic scent of the bays, faintly suggestive of funeral wreaths,—all made the place an ideal one for ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... that man 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, Which his ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... "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
... 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 ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... ceased to think of it. When they knelt upon the turf beside some crystal brook, and drank of the water which seemed red wine or molten gold according to the nature of the trees above it, it might have been the water of Lethe. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... 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 ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... Lethe nor Nepenthe," remarked he; "but I have learned many new secrets in the wilderness, and here is one of them—a recipe that an Indian taught me, in requital of some lessons of my own, that were as old as Paracelsus. Drink it! It may be less soothing than a sinless conscience. ...
— The Scarlet Letter • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and as though growing in some medium thicker than air, was mass upon mass of verdure—fruiting trees and trees laden with pale blossoms, arbours and bowers of pallid blooms, like that sea fruit of oblivion—grapes of Lethe—that cling to the tide-swept walls of the ...
— The Moon Pool • A. Merritt
... "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 far Inland—where even you cannot come and get ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... 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 of monstrous snakes, on which Pluto sat. ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent
... 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, But bracing essences that ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... frightful pains all over his body, which by and by subsiding, he sank again to the bottom of the black Lethe. ...
— The Marquis of Lossie • George MacDonald
... passed the 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 ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... the House of Lords, the Royal Slave, with Lethe. At the theatre in St. Stephen's chapel, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... has drank 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 ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... very necessary, to make a perfect elysium (sic), that there should be a river Lethe, which I am not so happy as to find. To say truth, I am sometimes very weary of the singing, and dancing, and sunshine, and wish for the smoke and impertinencies in which you toil; though I endeavour to persuade ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... often but a few feet apart. Bullets flew thick as hail, a tree eighteen inches through being cut clean off by them. Great heaps of dead and wounded lay between the lines, and "at times a lifted arm or a quivering limb told of an agony not quenched by the Lethe of death around." Lee did not give up this death-grapple till three o'clock in the morning, when he fell back to a new position. His losses here in killed and wounded were about ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... cause hast them to show Of sacrifice unsped? Of all thy slaves below I most have labored With service sung and said; Have cull'd such buds as blow, Soft poppies white and red, Where thy still gardens grow, And Lethe's waters weep. Why, then, art thou my foe? Wilt ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... goose to be had for a shilling at the eating-house near Golden Square. Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Green, Mrs. Walker and all the other mistresses, are too vapid and stupid and humdrum for endurance. The theatres are dull as Lethe, and politics have lost their salt. Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... relief this is! See how men are driven by an accusing conscience—longing for deliverance from themselves, since in themselves they carry the executioner of broken law. Hear them crying out for waters of Lethe to drown the sting of memory. Again see them courting death in the vain hope of finding deliverance from their shame. But death will bring no deliverance to the impenitent. Behold Dives: "Son, remember!" ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... laughed. "I was going to be a poet, you understand—a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed 'Lethe,' but I could never hear ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... 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 ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... mists that hang low by Lethe's banks have already brought forgetfulness before their feet grow icy with the first step into the dark water. To meet on Lethe-side is to meet, maybe; but with a sad unrecognising meeting. To lie together in oblivion, with sightless eyes, and dulled hearts and listless ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... likeness we can cherish of that inconceivable nothingness—ever denied by the very thinking of it—by the vain attempt to realize that whose very existence is the knowing nothing of itself! Could that dagger have insured me such repose, or had there been any draught of Lethe, utter Lethe, whose blessed poison would have assuredly dissipated like a fume this conscious self-tormenting me, I should not now be writhing anew, as in the clutches of an old grief, clasping me like a corpse, stung to simulated ...
— Wilfrid Cumbermede • George MacDonald
... let my battle cease; I care not where I stay nor when I go; For action gives unhappiness and woe, But Lethe brings forgetfulness and peace; A birth, a life, a death; man ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller |
