"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Styx, you soon meet another stream, appropriately called Lethe. The echoes here are absolutely stunning. A single voice sounds like a powerful choir; and could an organ be played, it would deprive the hearer of his senses. When you have crossed, you enter a high level hall, named the Great Walk, half a mile ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... 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
... mood, my ordinary formulas and habits fall away from me so completely that I feel myself no longer either townsman, or professor, or savant, or bachelor, and I remember no more of my past than if it were a dream. It is like a bath in Lethe. ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... ever, with foil'd lips of drouth, The wave that wearies not to mock his mouth. 'Tis Lethe's; they alone that tide have quaff'd Who never thirsted for the ...
— The Poems of William Watson • William Watson
... satisfied myself that I had been deceived in the quantity of opium I had taken, I became also convinced that I had at last discovered the great antidote for which philosophy had exhausted its resources, the fabled Lethe, the oblivion of human sorrow. The strong necessity of suicide had passed away; life, even for me, might be rendered tolerable by the sovereign panacea of opium, the only true minister to a mind diseased, the sought ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... 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
... shadowy pool, overhung by wild fantastic masses of rock, which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the mighty waters of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... advice, keep it to thyself, and which Chrysostom calls palaestram philosophiae, et domesticum gymnasium a school of philosophy, put it up. There is no other cure but time to wear it out, Injuriarum remedium est oblivio, as if they had drunk a draught of Lethe in Trophonius' den: to conclude, age will bereave her of it, dies dolorem minuit, time and ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior
... published in 1809, under the title of Imitations and Translations from The Ancient and Modern Classics. Byron contributed nine original poems. The volume was not a success. "It foundered ... in the Gulph of Lethe."—Letter to H. Drury, July 17, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... stage with the mail should have been coincident with the departure of the stage that brought the travellers from "Town," but Chugg was late—a tardiness ascribed to indulgence in local lethe waters, for Lemuel Chugg had survived a romance and drank to forget that woman is a variable and a changeable thing. In consequence of which the sober stage-driver departed without the mails, leaving ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'T is that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring, Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep: Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; A mortal mother ...
— Don Juan • Lord Byron
... degenerated. At the commencement of the present century, its mimic scenes afforded a species of consolation for the sad realities of life, and formed the Lethe in whose waters oblivion was gladly sought. The public afterward became so practical in its tastes, so sober in its desires, that neither the spirit of the actor nor the coquetry of the actress ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... 7-1/5 cents! And a mass of Loewenbraeu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen to my ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... the common belief. But the saying is far from true; and Shakespeare's ghost must have sipped large draughts of Lethe, to be capable of speaking thus. For, though the least that he did is worth more than all that was done before him, and though his poorest performances surpass the best of his models; it is nevertheless certain that ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... waters of Lethe, Babs? By the way, seen anything of our friend Mr. Courtier? Very ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... for ever behind me. 29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross] 30. Cagot and Cressida. 31. Lethe and Anapaula. 32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with Curious Eyes ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... verses; 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. Evremond ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... the two eyes look upon. For the bishop looks upon the South to invite, but the dean upon the North to avoid it. The one sees to be saved, the other not to be lost. The brow of the church beholds with these eyes the candles of Heaven and the darkness of Lethe. Thus the senseless stones enwrap the mysteries of the living stones, the work made with hands sets forth the spiritual work; and the double aspect of the Church is clear, adorned with double equipage. A golden majesty paints the entry of the choir: and properly in his proper image Christ crucified ...
— Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln - A Short Story of One of the Makers of Mediaeval England • Charles L. Marson
... Knights 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 these poor knights have only for their fare a bob or flirt on the nose, and in the evening ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... my strait breast; Enlarge it downward, that sure rest May there be pight for that pure fire pitched. Wherewith thou wontest to inspire All self-dead souls: my life is gone; Sad solitude's my irksome won; dwelling. Cut off from men and all this world, In Lethe's lonesome ditch I'm hurled; Nor might nor sight doth ought me move, Nor do I care to be above. O feeble rays of mental light, That best be seen in this dark night, What are you? What is any strength If it be not laid in one length With pride or love? I nought desire ...
— England's Antiphon • George MacDonald
... 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... acquired goodness will take upon them human form"; and Virgil says: "After death, the souls come to the Elysian fields, or to Tartarus, and there meet with the reward or punishment of their deeds during life. Later, on drinking of the waters of Lethe, which takes away all memory of the past, they return to earth." But it must be admitted that Rome was deficient in spiritual insight and beliefs, on the whole, her material successes having diverted her attention from the problems which had ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... life, within this holy fane, Like a poor ghost around its sepulchre To linger out my days? Or call you that A life of conscious happiness and joy, When every hour, dream'd listlessly away, 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, woman's lot, ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... 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
... 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 brought up apart from "religious ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... the spheres. The second lambda is inserted in order to avoid the ill-omened sound of destruction. The Muses are so called—apo tou mosthai. The gentle Leto or Letho is named from her willingness (ethelemon), or because she is ready to forgive and forget (lethe). Artemis is so called from her healthy well-balanced nature, dia to artemes, or as aretes istor; or as a lover of virginity, aroton misesasa. One of these explanations is probably true,—perhaps all of them. Dionysus is o didous ton oinon, and oinos is quasi oionous because ...
— Cratylus • Plato
... forgotten, and forgotten thus; for if they were 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 ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... that pride may urge Thy claims to memory's grateful lore, And boast, as rapt from Lethe's surge, The ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... the royal pair, preceded by the pages-in-waiting, entered the council chamber. The council was already assembled. On either side of a throne of sulphur, from which issued the four infernal rivers of Lethe, Phlegethon, Cocytus, and Acheron, were ranged the Eumenides and Parcae. Lachesis and her sisters turned up their noses when they observed Proserpine; but the Eumenides could not stifle their fury, in spite of the hints of their more subdued but not ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... that every prince of the Church or State throughout Europe was wholly occupied with the fine arts, had still its moiety of truth. A poetical passage cannot be understood without a rich memory, and like the older school of painting appeals to a tradition, and that not merely when it speaks of 'Lethe's Wharf' or 'Dido on the wild sea-banks' but in rhythm, in vocabulary; for the ear must notice slight variations upon old cadences and customary words, all that high breeding of poetical style where there ...
— Certain Noble Plays of Japan • Ezra Pound
... tyrant never grows old, Rome, under Sylla as under Domitian, resigned itself and willingly put water in its wine. The Tiber was a Lethe, if the rather doctrinary eulogium made of it by Varus Vibiscus is to be credited: Contra Gracchos Tiberim habemus, Bibere Tiberim, id est seditionem oblivisci. Paris drinks a million litres of water a day, but that does not prevent it from occasionally ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... time, retrieve the fates, Roll back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates Of death and Lethe, where (confused) lie Great heaps of ...
— A Life of William Shakespeare - with portraits and facsimiles • Sidney Lee
... 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 myself, ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... particularly well in this part of the world; the little pug dog, or Dutch mastiff, which our English ladies were once so fond of, that poor Garrick thought it worth his while to ridicule them for it in the famous dramatic satire called Lethe, has quitted London for Padua, I perceive; where he is restored happily to his former honours, and every carriage I meet here has a pug in it. That breed of dogs is now so near extirpated among us, that I recoiled: only ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... in "Lake Lethe," a quarter of a mile from the Styx, as well as in "Echo River," the largest and most interesting body of water in the cave. This last flows out of a tunnel which has such a low roof that the volume of water nearly fills it, and from here to where it enters the rocks again is three quarters ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... apt; And duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,[105] Wouldst thou not stir in this. Now, Hamlet, hear: 'Tis given out that, sleeping in mine orchard,[106] A serpent stung me; so the whole ear of Denmark Is by a forged process[107] of my death Rankly abus'd: but know, thou noble youth, The serpent that did ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... thou hast wounds, Weeping as fast as they stream 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 Dost thou ...
— The New Hudson Shakespeare: Julius Caesar • William Shakespeare
... bitter past, and the bitter world that recalled it. He thought of 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
... 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 ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... those who 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 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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 ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... 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 hands,—that ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... 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 darling, I ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... mist, except the very summit, over which the Moon was hanging. The peacefulness of the hour stole into his heart, and his brain calmed down. The mountain suggested to him the past, and the pure, white mist shrouding it seemed like vapour risen from the merciful waters of Lethe. The Moon suggested hope, vague and undefined, lint still hope. With the swing as of a pendulum his consciousness swept back from the dark night of despondency and bathed its wings in light. Then his soothed spirit felt the need ...
— Kafir Stories - Seven Short Stories • William Charles Scully
... 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
... Septimius, "our identity would change in that repose; it would be a Lethe between the two parts of our being, and with such disconnection a continued life would be equivalent to a new ...
— Septimius Felton - or, The Elixir of Life • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... occasion, which was received with "Yo-ha!—Yo-ha!" They then said, laughing, "that they hoped their father would allow them a little milk," meaning whisky, which was accordingly granted. They drank of this modern Lethe and forgot for ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... comparison the old architecture of London addresses itself to the eye,—St. Paul's Cathedral, for instance, with its vast blotches and stains, as if it had been dipped in some black Lethe of oblivion, and then left to be restored by the rains and the elements! This black Lethe is the London smoke and fog, which has left a dark deposit over all the building, except the upper and more exposed parts, where the original ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... was across the drift of Lethe in the darkness, but never for long together. Once he woke uneasily with a start and saw a flash. The crash followed as in one beat, and the rain was like the rain in King Lear. He was broadly awake now. Two carriers were nestling ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... 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 her face ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... in!— Into each secret room; Would that my sleep-bright eyes could win To the inner gloom; Gaze from its high windows, Far down its mouldering walls, Where amber-clear still Lethe ...
— Collected Poems 1901-1918 in Two Volumes - Volume I. • Walter de la Mare
... of Erebus 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 6 • Various
... 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 ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... heart all yearnings for the land. For him there was to be no green or sequestered spot in the valley of household peace. His bark was to know no haven, and his soul not even the desire of rest. For action is that Lethe in which alone we forget our former dreams, and the mind that, too stern not to wrestle with its emotions, seeks to conquer regret, must leave itself no leisure to look behind. Who knows what benefits to the world may have sprung from the sorrows of the ...
— The Pilgrims Of The Rhine • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... violet-meads appearing Once fairer to my gaze than poet's dream— Now all your golden light to gloom is veering, And every floweret laves in Lethe's stream. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 270, Saturday, August 25, 1827. • Various
... ghastly Club, between you and the bony, "mighty-mouthed," harsh-toned termagant and dyspeptic of the nineteenth! The growl of the English mastiff and the snarl of the Scotch terrier would make a duet which would enliven the shores of Lethe. I wish I could find our "spiritualist's" paper in the Portfolio, in which the two are brought together, but I hardly know what I shall find ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is all I ever received from the Government, though I had some claim to the royal favour; for in 1710, when the enemies to our constitution were contriving its ruin, I wrote a pamphlet entitled "Lethe," which was published in Holland, and afterwards translated into English, and twice printed in London; and being reprinted in Dublin, proved so offensive to the ministry in Ireland, that it was burnt by the hands of the hangman. But so it is, that after having showed ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... 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 ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... a paile of water, By the sad sweet springs that have salved our sorrow, The fates that haunt us, the grief that grips— Where we walk not to-day nor shall walk not tomorrow The wells of Lethe for wearied lips. With souls nor shaken with tears nor laughter, With limp knees loosed as of priests that pray, We bowed us and bent to the white well-water, We dipped and we ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... the hardest of circumstances. The Trail was the home of the Sioux, the Cheyennes, the Arapahoes, the Otoes, Omahas, Utes, and others, who knew neither law nor mercy. The waters were often alkaline and deadly as Lethe. A thousand miles afoot was the record some had to make. They appealed to the government, then at war with Mexico, to permit a number of their men to enlist as soldiers to be marched over the ancient Santa Fe Trail, and thus be able to draw wages on the journey. This was granted. These recruits ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... We have drunken of Lethe at length, we have eaten of lotus; What hurts it us here that sorrows are born and die? We have said to the dream that caressed and the dread that smote us ...
— A Century of Roundels • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... wish never to leave this place, but to stay here," said he. "I know nothing of my past life. I have drunk of Lethe. Yet I can not help struggling to regain knowledge ...
— Cord and Creese • James de Mille
... dissembling face, And to her faith commit the Trojan race? Shall I believe the Siren South again, And, oft betray'd, not know the monster main?" He said: his fasten'd hands the rudder keep, And, fix'd on heav'n, his eyes repel invading sleep. The god was wroth, and at his temples threw A branch in Lethe dipp'd, and drunk with Stygian dew: The pilot, vanquish'd by the pow'r divine, Soon clos'd his swimming eyes, and lay supine. Scarce were his limbs extended at their length, The god, insulting with superior strength, Fell heavy ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... sigh for winter come. No singing bird, Nor harvest field, is near the path I tread; An empty husk is all I have to keep. The largess of my giving left me bare, And I ask God but for His Lethe—sleep. ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... seamless stalactite, and called, I believe, Serena's Bower. I lost the light of one day. I saw high domes, and bottomless pits; heard the voice of unseen waterfalls; paddled three quarters of a mile in the deep Echo River, whose waters are peopled with the blind fish; crossed the streams "Lethe" and "Styx"; plied with music and guns the echoes in these alarming galleries; saw every form of stalagmite and stalactite in the sculptured and fretted chambers,—the icicle, the orange-flower, the acanthus, the grapes, and the snowball. We shot Bengal ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... 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 ear: ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 1, April, 1851 • Various
... sip of the waters of Lethe, before beginning the full draught, he placed a franc on number seven and lost. Another franc on six suffered the same fate. He threw a five-franc cart-wheel recklessly ...
— The Man Upstairs and Other Stories • P. G. Wodehouse
... with faded eyes, all spent of tears; Men who have lived for love, yet lived alone; And worse than so, whose grief cannot be said. O God, thou hast a work to do indeed To save these hearts of thine with full content, Except thou give them Lethe's stream to drink, And that, my God, were all ...
— A Hidden Life and Other Poems • George MacDonald
... monument of the irrevocable past on which what is written is changelessly written. How different too are the bright sparkling fountains that leap with ever-varying beauty at the foot of the Flaminian obelisk now, from the dull, sleepy monotonous river that, like a Lethe flood, flowed past it in the old days at Heliopolis! Are they not both symbolical of the new and the old world, of the Christian faith, with its progressive thought and varied expanding life, and the stagnant pagan creed, which impressed ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... with an air of enthusiasm on the virtues of Sultan Mahmoud, all the cruelty, indignity, and outrage committed on her countrymen and relations, by his orders, seemed to vanish from the old lady's recollection, as though she had tasted of the fabled Lethe. ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... 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 ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... rebuke she speaks thy name, The ice about thy heart melts as the snow On mountain height; and in swift overflow Comes gushing from thy lips in sobs of shame. Thou makest full confession; and a gleam, As of the dawn on some dark forest cast, Seems on thy lifted forehead to increase; Lethe and Eunoe—the remembered dream And the forgotten sorrow—bring at last That perfect pardon which is ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
... there is no laughter at all; and where the puzzled dead go wandering 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
... 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 like a roasting ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... 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 ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... 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, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Peale's picture of the Court of Death a cadaverous shape lies for judgment at the foot of the throne, touching at either extremity the waters of Lethe. There is something similar in the history of the greatest of Spanish writers. No man knew, for more than a century after the death of Cervantes, the place of his birth and burial. About a hundred years ago the investigations ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... wretchedness and sin. No lust To justify the wretch who binds his soul In the drear darkness of a murky cell, Scraping for gold as beasts do in the earth For carrion, and counting life-time out By ducats; closing house and heart alike To the benignant sunshine. If our hearts Could lave in Lethe's cleansing stream sometimes, Till evil vanished from its memory, And left a virgin tablet for the pen Of Nature, life would be ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... cannot see thee, And the round skies are far and steep; A-wild to quaff some cup of Lethe, Pain is proud ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... orchard where grow the golden apples of Hesperides, and the dragon is dead now that used to guard them, and so any one may help himself to the beautiful fruit. And by the side of the orchard flows the river Lethe, of which it is not well for man to drink, though many men would taste it ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... theatre royal in 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
... forward to their emancipation, and return to Liberty with more Joy, and with more lingering expectation, than I do to my escape from this maternal bondage, and this accursed place, which is the region of dullness itself, and more stupid than the banks of Lethe, though it possesses contrary qualities to the river of oblivion, as the detested scenes I now witness, make me regret the happier ones already passed, and ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... e'en 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 ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... say little, for she was tired, and made haste to get into bed. It was not long before the subject of their plans and problems and visions of spies and "jam-stained fists" were lost in the lethe of dreamland. ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... the weapon. "The fools cannot hold the shell. But neither shall they delay its breaking. Dead you were, mandrake son, and dead you shall be again. But since the fault is only theirs, may no ill dreams follow you beyond Lethe!" ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... 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 spirit. After a time the longing for drink becomes a mania. Life seems as insupportable ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... 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
... magic touch dispels oblivion's shade: Pensive her look; on radiant wings that glow Like Juno's birds, or Iris' flaming bow, She sails; and swifter than the course of light Directs her rapid intellectual flight: The fugitive ideas she restores, And calls the wandering thought from Lethe's shores; To things long past a second date she gives, And hoary time from her fresh youth receives; 100 Congenial sister of immortal Fame, She shares her power, and Memory is her name. O first-born daughter of primeval time! By whom transmitted down in every clime ...
— The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer - With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Rev. George Gilfillan [Ed.]
... for the Rest from every pain and ill? Who's for the Lethe's plain? the Donkey-shearings? Who's for ...
— The Frogs • Aristophanes
... he passed through the Gates with the light and the cloud of his song, Dry-shod over Lethe he passed to the chasms of hell; And the hosts of the dead made mock at him, crying, How long Have we dwelt in the darkness, oh fool, and shall ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... of our own before us, Siegmund!' she scolded. 'The mist is Lethe. It is enough for us if ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... much the sons of men and 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 place is ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... her golden rim, And, softly dripping, drop by drop, Upon the quiet mountain top. Steals drowsily and musically Into the univeral valley. The rosemary nods upon the grave; The lily lolls upon the wave; Wrapping the fog about its breast, The ruin moulders into rest; Looking like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not, for the world, awake. All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies (Her easement open to the skies) Irene, with ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... for surcease of pain, Pilgrim to Lethe I came; Drank not, for pride was too keen, Stung by the sound ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... But duller shouldst thou be than the fat weed That roots itself in ease on Lethe's wharf, Wouldst thou not stir ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... 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 ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... it came into his 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 some ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... 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 ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... "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
... reducing to one volume from two (more meo), a trashy Book, 'Bernard's Recollections of the Stage,' with some good recollections of the Old Actors, up to Macklin and Garrick. But, of all people's, one can't trust Actors' Stories. In 'Lethe,' where your Garrick figures in Sir Geoffrey, also figured Woodward, as 'The Fine Gentleman'; so I think, at least, is the Title of a very capital mezzotint I have ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... and, only for the fire, Approach'd not nearer. When my eyes were fed By looking on him, with such solemn pledge, As forces credence, I devoted me Unto his service wholly. In reply He thus bespake me: "What from thee I hear Is grav'd so deeply on my mind, the waves Of Lethe shall not wash it off, nor make A whit less lively. But as now thy oath Has seal'd the truth, declare what cause impels That love, which both thy looks and ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... 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 ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... 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 for the action of the sensitive faculty, ...
— The Heroic Enthusiast, Part II (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... old mythologies relate, Some draught of Lethe might await The slipping thro' from state ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... birds, and through the rocky cave The clear stream gushing, their according sounds Should mingle, and, like some strange music, steal Sadly, yet soothing, o'er his aching breast. And thou, pale exile from thy native shores,[52] Here drink,—oh, couldst thou!—as of Lethe's stream! Nor friends, nor bleeding country, nor the views Of hills or streams beloved, nor vesper bell, Heard in the twilight ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... intemperance. Among the poor, the constant war with fate, the harassing conditions of daily life, and the apparent hopelessness of trying to improve their condition, do undoubtedly tend to make them 'drown their sorrows' and rush for relief to the fiery waters of that Lethe which the publican dispenses at so much a glass. Ask any of the temperance workers in the viler districts, and they will tell you how they have watched hundreds of decent folk come into a bad neighborhood, and gradually sink under the degrading influences of their surroundings. There ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks
... Atlantic is a Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the Pacific, which is three times ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Orientale; yet he re-translated the tales from the original Arabic (Continues, Paris, 1806), and in this he was followed by Gauttier, while Southey borrowed the idea of his beautiful romance, "Thalaba the Destroyer," now in Lethe from the "History of Maughraby." Mr. A. G. Ellis considers these tales as good as the old "Arabian Nights," and my friend Mr. W. F. Kirby (Appendix to The Nights, vol. x. p. 418), quite agrees with him that Chavis and Cazotte's Continuation is well worthy ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... war is absolutely necessary, 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
... howbeit I were of a sound and strong constitution, 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; and besides, I had a marvelous ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... and when he had heard me to the end he said: "I might have thought of that. You sometimes need a cup of Lethe water. But now let such things alone, and don't compromise your reputation as a scientist ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... deck. Its upper surface was quite flat and smooth, save for innumerable tiny molehills or pyramids of mist. We seemed to be ploughing aimlessly through the phantasmal sand-dunes of another world, faintly and by an accident apprehended. So may the shades on a ghostly liner, plunging down Lethe, have an hour's chance glimpse of the lights and lives of Piccadilly, to them uncertain and filmy ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... the fascinations 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 ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... 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 had it in ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... withdrawn 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
... people contented 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 cloth being removed, the company, as usual, grew eloquent over ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,— Would'st thou not stir ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... 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 thou not ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... 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
... 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
... the snow was drifting by the windows, the ghost of Niafer went restlessly about green fields beneath an ever radiant sky in the paradise of the pagans. When the kindly great-browed warders asked her what it was she was seeking, the troubled spirit could not tell them, for Niafer had tasted Lethe, and had forgotten Dom Manuel. Only her love for him had not been forgotten, because that love had become a part of her, and so lived on as a blind longing and as a desire which did not know its aim. And they relate also that in Suskind's low red-pillared ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell
... 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 ...
— Purgatory • Mary Anne Madden Sadlier
... as 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 ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... Ptolomaea: Traitors to their Friends. Friar Alberigo, Branco d' Oria. XXXIV. Fourth Division of the Ninth Circle, the Judecca: Traitors to their Lords and Benefactors. Lucifer, Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. The Chasm of Lethe. The Ascent. ...
— Divine Comedy, Longfellow's Translation, Hell • Dante Alighieri
... and Fancy grace, When grosser eyes are clos'd in sleep, The gentle spirits of the place 35 Waft up the insuperable steep, On whose vast summit broad and smooth Her nest the Phoenix Bird conceals, And where by cypresses o'erhung The heavenly Lethe steals. 40 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Vol I and II • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose; nor call to you, through your casement,—call (not giving you the name of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy Lethe, stood wreathing flowers ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... him a spacious valley, with trees gently waving to the wind, a tranquil landscape, through which the river Lethe flowed. Along the banks of the stream wandered a countless multitude, numerous as insects in the summer air. AEneas, with surprise, inquired who were these. Anchises answered, "They are souls to which bodies are to be given in due time. Meanwhile they dwell on Lethe's bank, and drink oblivion ...
— TITLE • AUTHOR
... villain 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
... drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... I salute thee; I, Obscurity, The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe; I, that envy thy brightness, greet ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... Lethe: Vittoria! My dearest happiness! Vittoria! What do you ail, my love? why do ...
— The White Devil • John Webster
... that here in Isis swim Such stately swans so confident in dying, That when they feel themselves near Lethe's brim, They sing their fatal dirge when death is nighing. And I like these that feel my wounds are mortal, Contented die for her whom I adore; And in my joyful hymns do still exhort all To die for such a saint or love no more. Not that my torments or her tyranny Enforce me to enjoin so ...
— Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles - Phillis - Licia • Thomas Lodge and Giles Fletcher
... 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 indutus cum uxore Proserpina in solio sedebat. ...
— Ritchie's Fabulae Faciles - A First Latin Reader • John Kirtland, ed.
... he is probably weaned of revolutions, and possesses all the calmness of a man whose first years have been spent in excitement and troubles, and who at length finds consolation in study alone; the well of science proving to him the waters of Lethe, in which he drinks the oblivion of all his past sorrows. And it is very much the case in Mexico at present, that the most distinguished men are those who live most retired; those who have played their part on the arena ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... if he be fortunate in his love, will love wonderfully, and Eurydice is his worthy bride. Dying, bitten by a snake in the grass as she flees from danger, she descends to Hades. But the surpassing love of the sweet singer dares to enter that august shadow, not to drink the Waters of Lethe only and to forget, but also to drink the waters of Eunoe and to remember. His music charms the dead, and those who have the power of death. Even the hard-hearted monarch of hell is moved for ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... fountains dancing, And unforgotten hands. (Ah, God, I trod them 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... was faced with the latter. The doctor had talked airily of three or four months, and after that in all probability a spell of light duty, and to Vane that seemed like a permanency. It is one thing to drug oneself in the waters of Lethe for a fortnight of one's own free will: it is altogether different to be drugged by others for good. And dimly he felt that either he or they would have to go under. Two totally incompatible people cannot sit next one another ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... when the board was set, what faces smiled. We are too wise, with the cunning prudence of the years, to penetrate over-far beyond the rosy boundary of youth, lest we find also that bitter pool which is not Lethe, but the waters of ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... 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 do ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... (such is 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Apr 2, 1919 • Various
... cloak, and turned in to take my snooze. We weighed again 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 snake—like withes, while ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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 ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... calls past eternity, But Lethe's murmur stills its roar, The one vague truth that reaches thee Is ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... peasant, o'er his blazing hearth, Devotes the supper hour to love and mirth; No flowers on Piety's pure altar bloom; Alas! they wither now, and strew her tomb! From the Great Book of Nations fiercely rent, My country's page to Lethe's stream is sent— But sent in vain! The historic Muse shall raise O'er wronged Sarmatia's cause the voice of praise,— Shall sing her dauntless on the field of death, And blast her royal robbers' ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... here doth rest a worthie Dame, Extract and born of noble house and bloud, Her sire, Lord Paget, hight of worthie fame Whose virtues cannot sink in Lethe floud. Two brethern had she, barons of this realme, A knight her freere, Sir Henry Lee, he hight, To whom she bare three impes, which had to name, John, Henry, Mary, slayn by fortune spight, First two being yong, which cavs'd their parents mone, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 210, November 5, 1853 • Various
... 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, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... burden of a new despair; Famine, than whom Misrule no deadlier daughter Feeds from her thousand breasts, though sleeping there With lidless eyes, lie Faith, and Plague, and Slaughter, A ghastly brood; conceived of Lethe's sullen water. 3945 ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume I • Percy Bysshe Shelley
... estrangement, outrages, bloodshed, and murder separate us from this appealing cry wrung from the beating heart of this inspired Irishman. Is the great tragedy of England and Ireland that has sullied their annals for seven hundred years never to be brought to an end? Is there never to be for us a Lethe through which we may pass to the farther shore of forgetfulness and forgiveness of the past and ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... Looking like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not for the world awake. "The ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXII. No. 3. March 1848 • Various
... you! remember you! Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever. Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... crammed and crammed again, Aedituus took us into a chamber that was well furnished, hung with tapestry, and finely gilt. Thither he caused to be brought store of mirobolans, cashou, green ginger preserved, with plenty of hippocras, and delicious wine. With those antidotes, that were like a sweet Lethe, he invited us to forget the hardships of our voyage; and at the same time he sent plenty of provisions on board our ship that rid in the harbour. After this, we e'en jogged to bed for that night; but the devil a bit poor pilgarlic could sleep one wink—the everlasting jingle-jangle ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... throat's long, long melodious moan. I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes, Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks, And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart, Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art! Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?" Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired: "Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired! Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise, Telling ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... (2) In the 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: "Hail, thou who hast endured ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... I believe that Lethe was Joy's well. The past has floated from me like a bank of mist, I stand flooded in light. And if I look behind me I see nothing. Two phantoms merely,—my love for my mother, my love for you,—all ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... world-panoramic procession of all the gods and demi-gods and angels and demons that have ever visited this earth. I do not disparage it. I have never found it dull. Dull would he be, as "the fat weed that rots itself in case on Lethe's wharf," who found nothing curious and provocative about these Sirens and Centaurs and Lemures and Larvae and Cabiri and Phorkyads! I can myself endure very pleasantly even the society of those "Blessed Boys" which ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... clouds inhale the pitchy ground, And twilight lingers all the vale around. No watchful cocks Aurora's beams invite; No dogs nor geese, the guardians of the night: No flocks nor herds disturb the silent plains; Within the sacred walls mute quiet reigns, And murmuring Lethe soothing sleep invites; In dreams again the flying past delights: From milky flowers that near the cavern grow, Night scatters ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 him ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... 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
... nearly half past seven. The child lay supine; heavy-lidded eyes half opened upon this tormentress who had somehow succeeded in calling him back into the dimly lighted room from the shadows of Lethe's alluring banks. Miss Beaver, kneeling beside young Frank's bed, talked tenderly to him in a soft monotone. She made all manner of gratuitous promises, if only Frank would try like a good boy to get ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... December 1st, 1789 (in Histoire 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 ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle
... fool—perchance I am so still; You won't accept it! Let me dream you will: But that were idle. Shall we meet again? Why should we? Water for my burning brain? I could have loved thee—Could! I love thee yet Can only Lethe teach me to forget? Oblivion's balm, oh tell me where to find! Is it a tenant of the anguish'd mind? Or is it?—ha! at last I see it come; Waiter! a bottle of ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... 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 ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... in the humor to dare the impossible; dare through sheer irritability of heart—not mind. And so she saddled Lethe—an unregenerate pinto of the Southern Trail, whose concealed devilishness forcibly reminded one of Balzac's famous description: "A clenched fist hidden ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... soft air is breathing over the blossoms and new-born verdure which 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. ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers |
