"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Antonius! o'er whose head Calm days have flown and closed the sixtieth year, Back on this flight he looks and feels no dread To think that Lethe's waters flow so near. There is no day of all the train that gives A pang; no moment that he would forget. A good man's span is doubled; twice he lives Who, viewing his past ...
— A Williams Anthology - A Collection of the Verse and Prose of Williams College, 1798-1910 • Compiled by Edwin Partridge Lehman and Julian Park
... Correspondence. But Bettina has not, like Ariadne, had immortality conferred upon her through the verses of two great poets. She has rather taken it for herself, as Goethe said she was wont to do, in anticipating every gift. It is accordingly not in the Elegiacs of Ovid, flowing as a counter-stream to Lethe, that we may discern Bettina's gesture of immortal repose as a metamorphosed heroine. She is a type of the inspired lyrical nature, a belated child of the Renaissance. A graceful English song-writer of the Elizabethan period, Thomas Campion, who was as fond ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... is all gone. Oh, what a 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!" There are no waters of Lethe. There is only one way of securing peace and forgetfulness—confession, ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... 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 ...
— The World's Best Poetry, Volume 3 - Sorrow and Consolation • Various
... Here might I sing of Memmia's mincing mien, And all the movements of the soft machine: How two red lips affected zephyrs blow, To cool the Bohea, and inflame the beau: While one white finger, and a thumb, conspire To lift the cup, and make the world admire. Tea! how I tremble at thy fatal stream! As Lethe, dreadful to the love of fame. What devastations on thy banks are seen! What shades of mighty names which once have been! An hecatomb of characters supplies Thy painted altars' daily sacrifice. H——, P——, B——, aspers'd by thee, decay, As grains of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... 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, Hang up ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... of that great Babylon were thronging in their thousands toward Epsom Downs, where on that day the Derby, that pivotal event in the English year, was to be run. All London was astir, and had put on holiday attire, while I, now a poor weed drifting to rot on Lethe's wharf, was on ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... son much about the dwellers in Elysium. On the banks of the river Lethe—the river of forgetfulness—was a countless multitude of spirits which, he said, were yet to live in earthly bodies. They were the souls of unborn generations of men. Amongst them, he pointed out to AEneas, the spirits ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... — N. oblivion, obliviousness, lethe; forgetfulness &c adj.; amnesia; obliteration of &c 552, insensibility to the past &c 823. short memory, treacherous memory, poor memory, loose memory, slippery memory, failing memory; decay of memory, failure of memory, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... from lines of rifle-pits 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
... 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) Irene, ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... 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 ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... 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 ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... summoned his domestics, and bade them lose no time in preparing a most sumptuous banquet, and above all things not to fail of setting a golden beaker of the water of Lethe by Proserpina's plate. ...
— Myths That Every Child Should Know - A Selection Of The Classic Myths Of All Times For Young People • Various
... How still it is. Now is he mine at last,— Aye, mine alone, and mine forevermore. Now we can journey toward the river Lethe— And far beyond where never dawns the day. Yet first I'll seek his bleeding body yonder, And freely glut my eyes upon those features, Hated and yet so fair, ere they be marred By rising sunshine and ...
— Early Plays - Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans • Henrik Ibsen
... that ne'er think'st on that aged man— That Ariosto's old swift-paced man, Whose name is Time, who never lins to run, Loaden with bundles of decayed names, The which in Lethe's lake he doth entomb, Save only those which swan-like scholars take, And do deliver from that greedy lake. Inglorious may they live, inglorious die, That suffer learning live ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... about two in the 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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 storms ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... 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
... cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and seeks her adversary.' 'Old age is wisdom's youth, the day of her glorious flower' (Heracles, 8) might have stood as a text for Browning's Rabbi ben Ezra. The brands visible on the tyrant's soul, and the refusal of Lethe as a sufficient punishment (Voyage to the lower World, 24 and 28), have their parallels in our new eschatology. The decision of Zeus that Heraclitus and Democritus are to be one lot that laughter and tears will go together (Sale of Creeds, l3)—accords with our views ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... and of a tractable and yeelding condition, yet was I so heavie, so sluggish, and so dull, that I could not be rouzed (yea were it to goe to play) from out mine idle drowzinesse. What I saw, I saw it perfectly; and under this heavy, and as it were Lethe-complexion did I breed hardie imaginations, and opinions farre above my yeares. My spirit was very slow, and would goe no further than it was led by others; my apprehension blockish, my invention poore; ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... a certain dethroned Indian prince. Then our acquaintance was limited to two conversations; their unexpectedness, their gravity, and even severity, produced a strong impression on me then; but, in the course of time, like many other things, they sank into oblivion and Lethe. About seven years ago he wrote to me to America, reminding me of our conversation and of a certain promise I had made. Now we saw each other once more in India, his own country, and I failed to see any change wrought in his appearance by all these long ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... 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 ...
— The Works Of John Dryden, Vol. 7 (of 18) - The Duke of Guise; Albion and Albanius; Don Sebastian • John Dryden
... 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, of ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Young Betty {21} doth he flee! Light as the mote that daunceth in the beam, He liveth only in man's present e'e; His life a flash, his memory a dream, Oblivious down he drops in Lethe's stream. Yet what are they, the learned and the great? Awhile of longer wonderment the theme! Who shall presume to prophesy THEIR date, Where nought is certain, save ...
— Rejected Addresses: or, The New Theatrum Poetarum • James and Horace Smith
... I cannot see thee, And the round skies are far and steep; A-wild to quaff some cup of Lethe, Pain is ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... 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 under the degrading influences ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... 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, In Ruf., ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... "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
... scowling ferryman of the one, nor at the sweeping blow and demon-dragging of the other; but, seized Hylas-like by the limbs, and tearing up the earth in his agony, the victim is dashed into his destruction; nor is it the sluggish Lethe, nor the fiery lake, that bears the cursed vessel, but the oceans of the earth and the waters of the firmament gathered into one white, ghastly cataract; the river of the wrath of God, roaring down into the gulf where the world has melted with its fervent heat, choked with the ruin of ...
— The Old Masters and Their Pictures - For the Use of Schools and Learners in Art • Sarah Tytler
... September 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 are coming. ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... 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 ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... He was one of those men whose minds still hold communion with all the selves that they 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 ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... which once fleeted so cheerily, Floated as though we could never know pain, Drag their dull length along, sadly and drearily, Wearily praying for Lethe ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 eyes seek ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... To linger out my days? Or call you that A life of conscious happiness and joy, When every hour, dream'd listlessly away, Leads to those dark and melancholy 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, ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... fine-spun adamant Ithuriel's spear Could never pierce: for other stuff is here! (Points to himself.) No faint 'Alas!' no swift-repented sigh Can heal the cureless wound from which I die. Sure, reason finds that love his easy prey With Lethe aye at hand to point the way; With ordered fires like thine, I too could smother A heart in leash, find solace in another. Too fair, too dear—from whom the Fates me sever! Thou hast no heart to give—thou lov'dst ...
— Polyuecte • Pierre Corneille
... 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 ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett
... 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 ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... 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 the mind ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... her 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, ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... heart is full of fraud 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
... faces 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
... dost lift me. As I rise, Its Lethe from my garment drips and flows. Ere long I shall be safe in upper air, With thee, my life—with thee, my answered prayer Where thou art God in every wind that blows, And self alone, and ever, softly dies, There shall my being blossom, and I know ...
— A Book of Strife in the Form of The Diary of an Old Soul • George MacDonald
... those persons now 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 ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Vol. 56, No. 346, August, 1844 • Various
... all straight again. This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth that the Conquistadores sought for in the Floridas, and find ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... those who mourned for him. He had joined that troop of phantom children who come to us in our lonely hours, saying, "We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... come With ears attuned to 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... that God may let me drink of Lethe, that I may forget all that has ever been! Pray that I may be satisfied with what remains, and that my heart may how in ...
— Marie Antoinette And Her Son • Louise Muhlbach
... 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 to intrigue and show myself. I stand upon the stage, talk loud, and stare about, ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... boat shall some time bear From scenes of mirthfulness or care Each fated human soul,— Shall waft and leave its burden where The waves of Lethe roll. ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field
... 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 lingering ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil
... 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 off ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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
... must 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 ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... the Past throw their spells over the mossy church—at once triumph, tomb, and monument of Padre Junipero. Scattered over the coast of California, the padres now sleep in the Lethe of death. Fathers Kino, Salvatierra, Ugarte, and sainted Serra left their beautiful works of mercy from San Diego to Sonoma. With their companions, neither unknown tribes, lonely coasts, dangers by land ...
— The Little Lady of Lagunitas • Richard Henry Savage
... of carrying it on in our enemy's territory, rather 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
... 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 named—I don't ...
— Slave Narratives: Arkansas Narratives - Arkansas Narratives, Part 6 • Works Projects Administration
... 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 ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... 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 Curious ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... 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 ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... Hist. c. 34. Leunclavius Hist. Turcica Mussulmanica, l. xv. p. 577. Under the Greek empire these castles were used as state prisons, under the tremendous name of Lethe, or towers of oblivion.] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... down where I have trod, And they remain, and they remain, Etched in unutterable pain, Loved lips and faces now apart, That once were closer than my heart — In agony, in agony, And horribly a part of me.... For Lethe is for no man set, And in Hell ...
— Young Adventure - A Book of Poems • Stephen Vincent Benet
... the grim, stern ruler over hell. He is also called Hades and Orcus. He has a throne of sulphur, from beneath which flows the Rivers Lethe, or "Oblivion," Phlegethon, Cocytus and Acheron. In one hand he holds his fork and in the other the keys of hell, and beside him is the dog with three heads. He is described as being well qualified for his position, being inexorable and deaf to supplications, and an object of aversion and ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... in the covert of the vale a woodland and rustling forest thickets, and the river of Lethe that floats past their peaceful dwellings. Around it flitted nations and peoples innumerable; even as in the meadows when in clear summer weather bees settle on the variegated flowers and stream round the snow-white [709-742]lilies, all the plain is murmurous with their humming. ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... are wont to tell has often been overcome, once by Athene here, in Delphi by Apollo, in Argos by Here, in Aegina by Zeus, in Naxos by Bacchus, yet in his misfortunes has always been mild and amiable. Here at least he shares a temple in common with Athene, in which there is an altar dedicated to Lethe. And Hylas, as if he had become better tempered: One thing has escaped you, Menephylus, that we have given up the second day of September, not on account of the moon, but because on that day the gods seemed to have contended for the country. By all means, said Lamprias, by as much as Poseidon was ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch
... 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 ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... 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 International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... 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. The same play is acted in the world all throughout. Our insanity has only a ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... The river Lethe was a graceful appendage of the ancient Elysium; but it cannot be said that the shades which came to life again on its banks exhibited the same poetical progress in the way to happiness that we behold in the souls of Purgatory. When they left the abodes of bliss to reappear ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... was much nearer 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 instant I thought the Gulf Stream in my head was whirling me away ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion. Whereby you may see, that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below. There is an abstruse astrologer that saith, If it were not for two things that are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever stand a like distance one from another, and never ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... 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
... reader has already been enabled to form a judgment. To the last, alas! the reader must extend indulgence, and for it he may find excuse. We must compassionate even more than condemn the man to whom excitement has become nature, and who resorts to the physical stimulus or the momentary Lethe, when the mental exhilarations of hope, youth, and glory, begin to desert him. His alleged intemperance, however, which the Romans (a peculiarly sober people) might perhaps exaggerate, and for which he gave the excuse of a thirst produced by disease contracted in the dungeon of Avignon—evidently ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... butterflies may be found to the last; and at least 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
... 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 ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... 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 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 Adam and Eve had lived; and the poets had beheld it perhaps ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... Coast man. Both did their 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
... herself to her holiday, Albinia did so with a good grace, in imitation of her brother, who assured her that he had brought a bottle of Lethe, and had therein drowned wife, children, and parish. Mr. Kendal's spirits, as usual, rose higher every mile from Bayford, and they were a very lively party when they arrived ...
— The Young Step-Mother • Charlotte M. Yonge
... "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, ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... shouted the great birds of this land of Lethe, as Mr. Waples' stalagmite broke off and dropped him and set him astride of an ancient pterodactyl bird that flew off with its burden to an immense height, and swinging him there by the seat of his breeches, as if he were to be the pendulum of a fundamental and firmamental ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... "I behold the subterranean chamber beneath Malkin Tower, with its nine ponderous columns, its altar in the midst of them, its demon image, and the well with waters black as Lethe ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth
... seemed to 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 ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... writing to 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 carefully ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... 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 ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... Stygem hoc modo transierant, ad alterum veniebant flumen, quod Lethe appellabatur. Ex hoc flumine aquam bibere cogebantur; quod cum fecissent, res omnis in vita gestas e memoria deponebant. Denique ad sedem ipsius Plutonis veniebant, cuius introitus a cane Cerbero custodiebatur. Ibi Pluto nigro vestitu ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... overcome by the heat and light, it 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 ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... unfortunately mingled with much that we 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 ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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 His eyes ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... 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 that ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... 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, his scythe thrown ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... wounded spirit 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 so ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller
... old, how remote is it from us; exotic, extraneous; in all ways, coming from far abroad! The language of it is not foreign only but dead: Monk-Latin lies across not the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of Lethe, and one knows not where! Roman Latin itself, still alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic in comparison. And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin; covered deeper than Pompeii ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... 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 ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... meet! 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
... 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
... when weeping 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 grief that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... 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
... the glass her doom was dight. There was a little star-like purple flower, such as never grew on land or sea, nestling in the golden darkness of the fur. It seemed to April a flower that might have been plucked from the slopes of the blue hills of Nirvana, or found floating on the still waters of Lethe in that land where it is always afternoon. It brought dreams of romance to her heart, and made starry flowers of its own colour blossom in her eyes. She crushed the hat softly down upon her dark, winging hair, crinking and shaping it to frame ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... 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 ...
— The Hand But Not the Heart - or, The Life-Trials of Jessie Loring • T. S. Arthur
... Orphic Tablets the phrase "I am a child of earth and the starry heaven, but my race is of heaven (alone)" occurs more than once. In one of the longest of them the dead man is instructed "after he has passed the waters (of Lethe) where the white Cypress and the House of Hades are" to address these very words to the guardians of the Lake of Memory while he asks for a drink of cold water from that Lake. In another the dead person himself is thus addressed: ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... is pretended they lose the remembrance of all former things, even of their parents, treasure, and language, as if they had drunk of the water of oblivion, drawn out of the lake of Lethe. When they have been in this condition as long as their custom directs, they lessen this intoxicating potion; and, by degrees, the young men recover the use of their senses; but before they are quite well, they are shown in their towns; and the youths who have been huskanawed ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... broad head to wipe out my swaggering 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, or ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post |
