"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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
... LETHE (i. e. oblivion), in the Greek mythology a stream in the nether world, a draught of the waters of which, generally extended to the ghosts of the dead on their entrance into Pluto's kingdom, obliterated all recollection of ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... past eternity, But Lethe's murmur stills its roar, The one vague truth that reaches thee Is this—that thou ...
— Thoughts, Moods and Ideals: Crimes of Leisure • W.D. Lighthall
... I tremble at thy fatal stream! As Lethe dreadful to the love of fame. What devastations on thy bank are seen, What shades of mighty names that once have been! A hecatomb of characters supplies Thy painted alters' ...
— Lazy Thoughts of a Lazy Girl - Sister of that "Idle Fellow." • Jenny Wren
... the first order he would go down to the lade and cool his hands in the running water. It was an interesting spectacle to see four able-bodied sinners, who yesterday had given themselves to the study of Nature, now kneeling together, to efface their penalty in our waters of Lethe; but you must remember that they made no moan before the boys, and no complaint against the master. The school received them with respect when they came out, and Speug would indicate with a wink and a jerk of his head that Bulldog had exceeded himself; ...
— Young Barbarians • Ian Maclaren
... 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
... 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 would gather ere the end, and as to the nature of the last ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... that was of Themistocles," said Kennedy, "who rejected the offer of a Memoria Technicha, with the aspiration that some one could teach him to forget. Lethe is the grandest of rivers ...
— Julian Home • Dean Frederic W. Farrar
... sufferings." Oh, what a balm of oblivion time spreads over the wrongs, wounds, and afflictions of others, in the mind of the person who inflicts those wrongs and oppressions! The oppressor soon forgets. This robbery took place in 17[81]; it was in the year 1783 when he asserted that the waters of Lethe had been poured over all their wrongs and oppressions. Your Lordships will mark this insulting language, when he says that both the order of the Directors and the application of the Begums for redress must be ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. XII. (of XII.) • Edmund Burke
... harries Is love of the Best; Yawns the pit of the Dragon, Lit by rays from the Blest. The Lethe of Nature Can't trance him again, Whose soul sees the perfect, Which his eyes seek ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... 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 Aeneid of Virgil • Virgil
... mass of Loewenbraeu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... dispassionately its light and shadow. Having satisfied myself that I had been deceived in the quantity of opium I had taken, I became also convinced that I had at last discovered the great antidote for which philosophy had exhausted its resources, the fabled Lethe, the oblivion of human sorrow. The strong necessity of suicide had passed away; life, even for me, might be rendered tolerable by the sovereign panacea of opium, the only true minister to a mind diseased, the sought ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... was from Spain that the Emperor warned the princes composing the Confederation of the Rhine to have their contingents ready. His language is guarded—whether the cabinet of Vienna had drunk from the waters of Lethe or from those of the Danube, he himself would be ready. Besides, his actions could have but one meaning. The moment he reached Paris, significant looks and conduct warned Talleyrand to beware. "Is Joseph," the Emperor ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. III. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... he rebuked her, "it was not that which troubled you? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like a cloud before the moon. I never lived until I ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Man's Misery, that zig-zag passage so narrow and winding that the one behind cannot see his neighbor a yard ahead; and then out into the ample comfort of Great Relief. Merrily they filled the little boats and sailed down Echo River, where abound the eyeless fish; crossed Lake Lethe, where all care is said to be left behind; passed the huge Granite Coffin; stood wondering before the Great Eastern; shuddered beside the Dead Sea and the Bottomless Pit; climbed Martha's Vineyard, where huge bunches of grapes in stone looked as natural as life; took lunch in Washington Hall; revelled ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... 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 as described by the Jesuit that ...
— The Forest King - Wild Hunter of the Adaca • Hervey Keyes
... 10 to 30 in depth, and runs beneath an arched ceiling of smooth rock about 15 feet high, while the Styx, another river, is 450 feet long, from 15 to 40 feet wide, and from 30 to 40 feet deep, and is spanned by a natural bridge. Lake Lethe has about the same length and width as the river Styx, varies in depth from 3 to 40 feet, lies beneath a ceiling some 90 feet above its surface, and sometimes rises to a height of 60 feet. There is also a Dead Sea, quite a somber body of water. ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... 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 Of Whirlwind ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... explained to him the nature of the place, and how the rivulet was the Lethe of Paradise;—Lethe, where he stood, but called Eunoe higher up; the drink of the one doing away all remembrance of evil deeds, and that of the other restoring all remembrance of good.[54] It was the ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... naturally be expected that in this letter he would have given some account of the person from whom he had taken this bribe. But here, as in the other cases, he had a most effectual oblivion; the Ganges, like Lethe, causes a drowsiness, as you saw in Mr. Middleton; they recollect nothing, they know nothing. He has not stated, from that day to this, from whom he took that money. But we have made the discovery. And such is the use of Parliamentary inquiries, such, too, both to ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... prince of my great hopes forget So great indignities you laid upon me? What! rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison The immediate heir of England! Was this easy? May this be wash'd in Lethe, ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 41, Saturday, August 10, 1850 • Various
... keeps for ever behind me. 29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross] 30. Cagot and Cressida. 31. Lethe and Anapaula. 32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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
... me," said Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... freed from the body. This is the heathen paradise, consisting of pleasant plains, the most verdant fields, the shadiest groves, and the finest and most temperate air that can be found. After the souls of the pious have spent many ages in these Elysian fields, they drink the water of the river Lethe, which makes them forget all things past; and then they return to the world and ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... 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 virtue sacrificed, ...
— Architects of Fate - or, Steps to Success and Power • Orison Swett Marden
... Fontaine had written a few indifferent 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 was still living in England, dirty ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... ghostly boat shall some time bear From scenes of mirthfulness or care Each fated human soul!— Shall waft and leave his burden where The waves of Lethe roll. ...
— John Smith, U.S.A. • Eugene Field
... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 122, December, 1867 • Various
... been 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 his task was but to continue and perfect what was already begun. Not only ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... has most deeply 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 had power to attract an audience. The taste and love for art were superseded by criticism and low ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... dissolv'd, Fed with the fresh supply of earthly dregs, Threatening a dearth [107] and famine to this land! Flying dragons, lightning, fearful thunder-claps, Singe these fair plains, and make them seem as black As is the island where the Furies mask, Compass'd with Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon, Because my dear Zenocrate ...
— Tamburlaine the Great, Part II. • Christopher Marlowe
... and this notion was much encouraged by the subterranean nature of the mines which he caused to be worked. He thinks that the river Tartarus, so famed in the realms of Pluto, was no other than the Tartessa, or Guadalquivir of the present day, which runs through the centre of Spain. Lethe, too, he thinks to have been the Guadalaviar, in the same country. Pluto, he suggests, had heard of the beauty of Proserpine, the daughter of Ceres, queen of Sicily, and carried her thence, which gave rise to the tradition that she had been carried ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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
... grasped 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
... are numbered among her followers and wear the livery she has prescribed. Garrick's opinion of those playgoers of his time, whom he at last banished from his stage, may be gathered from the dialogue between AEsop and the Fine Gentleman, in his farce of "Lethe." AEsop inquires: "How do you spend your evening, sir?" "I dress in the evening," says the Fine Gentleman, "and go generally behind the scenes of both playhouses; not, you may imagine, to be diverted with ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... 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, ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs
... loved her—and, alas! for her—she knew also that she loved him. And between them a great gulf was fixed; deep, and wide, and impassable as the waters of Lethe. ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... enters eve or morn, The misty 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 the ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... 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;—the atmosphere seems refined, and the sky rendered more crystalline, ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... Trophonius in Boeotia, though he was nothing more than a hero, was in great reputation.(83) After many preliminary ceremonies, as washing in the river, offering sacrifices, drinking a water called Lethe, from its quality of making people forget every thing, the votaries went down into his cave, by small ladders, through a very narrow passage. At the bottom was another little cavern, the entrance of which was also exceeding small. There they ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... occasionally launches forth some political pamphlet, 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 of public life, have seen the inutility of their ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... "branch in Lethe dipped by Morpheus" slacks This Pilot's sight, or vanquishes his force. The ship he leaves may steer on other tacks; Will the new Palinurus hold her course With hand as firm and skill of such resource? He who, AEneas-like, Now takes the helm himself, perchance may strike On sunken shoals, or wish, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98, March 29, 1890 • Various
... sweet odours, and are sheltered awhile from heaven and hell; then in some moment the bubble bursts, and the god awakens and knows himself, and he rises again with giant strength to conquer; or else he succumbs, and the waves of Lethe, perhaps in mercy, blot out ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... easy to explain, 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
... 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
... into nurseries for the young coffee-trees which remain sheltered from the sun and wind till sufficiently grown to transplant. To enter one of these "semilleros," as they are here called, at noon day, produces an effect like that anciently ascribed to the waters of Lethe. After sitting down upon the trunk of a fallen cedar or palm-tree, and breathing for a moment, the freshness of the air and the odour of the passion flower, which is one of the most abundant, and certainly the most beautiful of the climate; the noise of the trees, which are continually ...
— Zophiel - A Poem • Maria Gowen Brooks
... 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
... 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, ...
— Iphigenia in Tauris • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... It is Beatrice, the woman we have worshipped. The ice congealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... 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 5,000; ...
— History of the United States, Volume 4 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... his head. He wanted to drink, but not with any thoughts of good fellowship in his heart. His was a fiercer desire—the craving for mad blood or the waters of Lethe. He chose a quiet corner in the reading room, and ...
— The Survivor • E.Phillips Oppenheim
... pack, with a whip at his back, To the deep Tantalian flood; In Lethe profound let envy be drown'd, That pines at another man's good; Let Sorrow's expense be banded from hence, All payments have greater delay, We'll spend the long nights in cheerful delights To drive the cold ...
— In The Yule-Log Glow—Book 3 - Christmas Poems from 'round the World • Various
... 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 in vain! ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... 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 with the lava-ashes ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... unwelcome and painful impression his account had produced on his young guest, now exerted himself to remove, or at least to lessen it; and turning the conversation into a classical channel, which with him was the Lethe to all cares, he soon forgot that Clarke had ever existed, in expatiating on the unappreciated excellences of Propertius, who, to his mind, was the most tender of all elegiac poets, solely because he was the most learned. Fortunately this vein of conversation, ...
— Eugene Aram, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... maguey—home of Moctezuma and Malinche!—I cannot wring thy memories from my heart! Years may roll on, hand wax weak, and heart grow old, but never till both are cold can I forget thee! I would not; for thee would I remember. Not for all the world would I bathe my soul in the waters of Lethe. Blessed ...
— The War Trail - The Hunt of the Wild Horse • Mayne Reid
... mute, To angry gods the scorn and prey, But tasted of the charmed fruit, And cast despair itself away; So, while unto thy lips, its shore, This stream of life enchanted flows, Remember'd grief, that stung before, Sinks down to Lethe's calm repose. So, while unto thy lips, its shore, The stream of life enchanted flows— Drown'd deep in Lethe's calm repose, The ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... meo), a trashy Book, 'Bernard's Recollections of the Stage,' with some good recollections of the Old Actors, up to Macklin and Garrick. But, of all people's, one can't trust Actors' Stories. In 'Lethe,' where your Garrick figures in Sir Geoffrey, also figured Woodward, as 'The Fine Gentleman'; so I think, at least, is the Title of a very capital mezzotint I have of ...
— Letters of Edward FitzGerald in Two Volumes - Vol. II • Edward FitzGerald
... strong, Jenny," he told his niece. "I have been most active in mind and body and am by no means so far down the hill of old age, that ends by the River of Lethe, as ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... think involuntarily of the "slime which the aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile." Many of us have been Anglo-Indian babies. Was there a time when we suffered caresses such as these? What a happy thing it is that Lethe flows over us as we emerge from infancy, and blots out all that was before. Another question has been stirring in my mind since that scene. What feeling or motive prompted those luscious blandishments? Was it simple hypocrisy? I do not think so. The pure hypocrite is much rarer than shallow ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... me than I then could imagine. Perhaps I was half conscious at last of a tremulous voice hailing the main-royal-yard from the top. But if so, the consciousness glided away from me, and left me in Lethe. But when, like lightning, the yard dropped under me, and instinctively I clung with both hands to the "tie," then I came to myself with a rush, and felt something like a choking hand at my throat. For an ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... many a trouble Would break like a bubble, And into the waters of Lethe depart, Did we not rehearse it, And tenderly nurse it, And give it a permanent ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... where are Phlegethon and Lethe found, for of the one thou art silent, and of the other thou sayest that it is formed ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... 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 ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... conveyed by smells, has within these few weeks brought many persons of both sexes to an untimely fate; and, what is more surprising, has, contrary to her profession, with the same odours, revived others who had long since been drowned in the whirlpools of Lethe. Another of the professors is to be a certain lady, who is now publishing two of the choicest Saxon novels[6], which are said to have been in as great repute with the ladies of Queen Emma's Court, as the 'Memoirs ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift
... and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... by then 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 well. She told ...
— Old Mr. Wiley • Fanny Greye La Spina
... his post on the quarter-deck until regularly relieved. Yet drowsiness being incidental to all natures, even to Napoleon, beside his own sentry napping in the snowy bivouac; so, often, in snowy moonlight, or ebon eclipse, dozed Mark, our harpooneer. Lethe be his portion this blessed night, thought I, as during the morning which preceded our enterprise, I eyed the man who might possibly ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... and a drowsy numbness pains My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk, Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk: 'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees, In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various
... as regards the human will, is as sure in Determination as it is in Consciousness. Habit is as inevitable as Memory; and as nothing can be forgotten, but, when once known, is known forever,—so nothing is done but will be done again. Lethe and Annihilation are only myths upon the earth, which men, though suspicious of their eternal falsehood, name to themselves in moments of despair and fearful apprehension. The poppy has only a fabled virtue; but, like Persephone, we have ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... & painted birds Wailing for food sail through the piercing air; Then you descend to deepest night and reign Great Queen of Tartarus, 'mid [Footnote: MS. mid] shadows dire, Offspring of Hell,—or in the silent groves Of, fair Elysium through which Lethe runs, The sleepy river; where the windless air Is never struck by flight or song of bird,— But all is calm and clear, bestowing rest, [28] After the toil of life, to wretched men, Whom thus the ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... hypochondriac of the eighteenth century, how one would like to sit at some 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 when it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is," he answered; "and on the way there is the orchard where grow the golden apples of Hesperides, and the dragon is dead now that used to guard them, and so any one may help himself to the beautiful fruit. And by the side of the orchard flows the river Lethe, of which it is not well for man to drink, though many men would taste it gladly." And again ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... But I was dead, an hour or more. I woke when I'd already passed the door That Cerberus guards, and half-way down the road To Lethe, as an old Greek signpost showed. Above me, on my stretcher swinging by, I saw new stars in the subterrene sky: A Cross, a Rose in bloom, a Cage with bars, And a barbed Arrow feathered in fine stars. I felt the vapours of forgetfulness Float ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... few minutes of walking brought them to its banks. The stream flowed greasily and dark, some forty yards wide, but in the middle it forked about a spit of sand not more than ten paces broad. It was a very Lethe of a river, running oilily and with a slumberous sound, and its ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... drunk from the spring of Lethe," said Benedetto, contemptuously. "Anselmo, have you forgotten ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... 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 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
... soothing wings betwixt me and my care. These eyes, which seem in love with weeping, close! And make my senses for a time thy bower, That whilst I sleep I may my sorrows lose. I do not crave that thou the wand of power, Three times in Lethe dipp'd, at me shouldst shake, And all my senses sprinkle o'er and o'er; Let souls, more fortunate, thereof partake— Of languid rest a portion scant and slight, My weary, wandering eyes content will make. Now all the world is hush'd; to sleep invite The falling stars, and lull'd appears the ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... strange, vague glance. No; they have drunk, but not of any mortal drink; the grapes are grown in Persephone's garden, the vat contains no fruits that have ripened beneath our sun. These strange, mute, solemn revellers have drunk of Lethe, and they are growing cold with the cold of death and of marble; they are the ghosts of the dead ones of antiquity, revisiting the artist of the Renaissance, who paints them, thinking he is painting life, while that which he paints is in ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... help the desperate weak. That night he learned how silence best can speak The awful things when Pity pleads for Sin. About the middle of the night her call Was heard, and he came wondering to the bed. "Now kiss me, dear! it may be, now!" she said, Lethe had passed those ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... Until the waters of Lethe have flowed over the burning torrent of your existence, shame and remorse will cry in your ears, and pursue you with the delirium of fever. Remember you! Do not doubt it, I will remember. And your husband will also remember you. Neither of us can ever forget you. ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... 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 lifted his eyes to Padre Esteban, and, half ...
— The Crusade of the Excelsior • Bret Harte
... Styx she goes, She takes the fogs from thence that rose, And in a bag doth them enclose, When well she had them blended. She hies her then to Lethe spring, A bottle and thereof doth bring, Wherewith she meant to work the ...
— The Sources and Analogues of 'A Midsummer-night's Dream' • Compiled by Frank Sidgwick
... consisted entirely of cypress, 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 ...
— The Infernal Marriage • Benjamin Disraeli
... plains, Half viewless through the gloom, vast Horror reigns, No happy 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 ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... pray 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
... Chinese do not want our opium, and unavailingly beseech us to stay this nefarious traffic, which is as if "the Rivers Phlegethon and Lethe were united in it, carrying fire and destruction wherever it flows, and leaving a deadly forgetfulness wherever it has passed." (The Rev. Dr. Wells Williams. "The Middle Kingdom," ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... year ago, will be darkened. There will be no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and Master Cratchit have gone to the front. But Tiny Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left, and my child is left, and yours—even your dear dreamchild "upon the tedious shores of Lethe" that always comes back at Christmas. It takes only one little child to make Christmas—one little child, and the angels who companion him, and the shepherds who come to see him, and the Wise Men who worship him ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... she was in the humor to dare the impossible; dare through sheer irritability of heart—not mind. And so she saddled Lethe—an unregenerate pinto of the Southern Trail, whose concealed devilishness forcibly reminded one of Balzac's famous description: "A clenched fist hidden in an ...
— Garrison's Finish - A Romance of the Race-Course • W. B. M. Ferguson
... high I heap it with the weed From Lethe wharf, whose potent seed Nicotia, big from Bacchus, bore And cast upon Virginia's shore, I'll think,—So fill the fairer bowl And wise alembic of thy soul, With herbs far-sought that shall distil, Not fumes to slacken thought and will, But bracing essences that nerve To wait, ...
— Pipe and Pouch - The Smoker's Own Book of Poetry • Various
... 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri
... shouldst thou be than the fat weed That rots itself in ease on Lethe wharf,— Would'st ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 367, May 1846 • Various
... to see The valley of sweet waters, were to know Earth paved like Heaven; and to seem such to me Even now what wants thy stream?—that it should Lethe be: * * * * * * * But o'er the blacken'd memory's blighting dream Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping as ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... 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 ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... many questions, stranger! Who can escape? To live is to remember. To die—oh, who would forget! Even had I been weeping, and not merely mocking time away, would my tears be of Lethe at my mouth's corners? No," said Anthea, "why feign and lie? All I am is but a memory lovely ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... surface of the tube, and its legs fell off as I extricated it. From all appearance the terrible Sarracenia was eating its victim alive. And yet, perhaps, I should not say 'terrible,' for the plant seems to supply its victims with a Lethe-like draught before ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... well in this part of the world; the little pug dog, or Dutch mastiff, which our English ladies were once so fond of, that poor Garrick thought it worth his while to ridicule them for it in the famous dramatic satire called Lethe, has quitted London for Padua, I perceive; where he is restored happily to his former honours, and every carriage I meet here has a pug in it. That breed of dogs is now so near extirpated among us, that I recoiled: only Lord Penryn who possesses such an animal; and I doubt not but many of the ...
— Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany, Vol. I • Hester Lynch Piozzi
... 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... duty to marry one, because importuned to that step. He, who waits at your feet and implores acceptance, might not be so miserable after all, as he and you imagine, should you decline his overtures. In the cares of a busy world, he may find a draught of the waters of Lethe. His affections,—if it be a pure and deep love that impels him, and not insanity or mental intoxication,—may be turned into other channels, and the remnant of his life prove, after all, an endurable evil. He may be directed to a companion, who will render his lot far more ...
— The Young Maiden • A. B. (Artemas Bowers) Muzzey
... 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
... his heart with shame and contrition. "So much remorse gnawed at my heart that I fell vanquished and what I then became she knoweth who gave me the cause" (Purg. XXXI, 49). He arose forgiven, the memory of his sin removed by the waters of Lethe. Then drinking of the waters of Eunoe he was made fit to ascend ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... 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 hear ...
— Sleep-Book - Some of the Poetry of Slumber • Various
... nothing wrong here," said Mr. Lindsay; "only I will not have her going to those old recollections she is so fond of. I wish I could make her drink Lethe!" ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell
... of green, sweet lands, Whose months are like your English Mays, I try to hide in Lethe's sands The bitter, old Bohemian days. But sorrow speaks in singing leaf, And trouble talketh in the tide; The skirts of a stupendous grief Are trailing ever at ...
— The Poems of Henry Kendall • Henry Kendall
... 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
... last ray is gone, Sure Lethe's dream would bless: In grief to think of bliss tha'ts flown, Adds pangs ...
— Inez - A Tale of the Alamo • Augusta J. Evans
... arms we straight do fly, And forthwith march away; Few towns or cities we come nigh Good liquor us deny; In Lethe deep our woes we steep - Our loves forgotten be, Amongst the jovialst we sing, Hang up ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay
... 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
... Commedia, merely personifies faith; others think it a real character, and say she was the daughter of the illustrious family of Portinari, for whom the poet entertained a purely platonic affection. She meets the poet after he has been dragged through the river Lethe (Purgatory, xxxi), and conducts him through paradise. Beatrice Portina'ri married Simon de Bardi, and died at the age of 24; Dante was a ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... no interest about insane people, except to the man of science; and even he very soon gets to that "ass's bridge," on the other side of which Nature, as the genius of occult things, stands with a satirical smile on her face, as she sees the proud savans toppling over into the Lethe of sheer ignorance, and getting drowned for their insane curiosity. In the asylum in France, mentioned by De Vayer, the inmates enjoyed exceedingly the imputed madness of the visiting physician. The same play is acted in the world all throughout. ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... we shouldn't get tired; and when two people feel that about each other they must live together—or part. I don't see what else they can do. A little trip along the coast won't answer. It's the high seas—or else being tied up to Lethe wharf. And I'm for the ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... Styx, you soon meet another stream, appropriately called Lethe. The echoes here are absolutely stunning. A single voice sounds like a powerful choir; and could an organ be played, it would deprive the hearer of his senses. When you have crossed, you enter a high level hall, named the Great Walk, half a mile of which brings ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... Elysium, past the long Slow smooth strong lapse of Lethe—past the toil Wherein all souls are taken as a spoil, The Stygian web of waters—if your song Be quenched not, O our brethren, but be strong As ere ye too shook ...
— Poems & Ballads (Second Series) - Swinburne's Poems Volume III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... 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 my ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... and her association with other officers less gloomy than the saturnine Napoleon, all this seemed to cool the love of Desiree Clary; she no more answered Napoleon's letters, and, in writing to his brother Joseph, he made bitter complaints: "It seems that to reach Genoa the River Lethe must first be crossed, and therefore Desiree writes no more." [Footnote: See "Memoires du Roi Joseph," ...
— The Empress Josephine • Louise Muhlbach
... 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
... thunder, or sometimes are burned away, while from the Glory that lies beyond flow the sweet-faced welcomers to greet those for whom they wait, bearing the cups from which they give to drink. I do not know what is in the cups, whether it be a draught of Lethe or some baptismal water of new birth, or both; but always the thirsting, world-worn soul appears to change, and then as it were to be lost in the Presence that gave the cup. At least they are lost to my sight. ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... your kindness, but I have only a few more words to say. The ancients had a beautiful fable about the water of Lethe, in which the soul that was bathed straightway forgot all that was sad and evil in its previous life; the most stained, disgraced, and mournful of souls coming forth fresh, blithe, and bright as a baby's. I suppose my absurd misunderstanding arose ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... his 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 of many of those who were to be his own descendants in the kingdom ...
— Story of Aeneas • Michael Clarke
... 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 ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... For him no portly paunch can swell; Large though his shop, his trade the same, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim, Despite his shop, his trade, his cash, The wretch who knows not ven'son hash, Living, shall forfeit civic fame, And dying, shall descend with shame, In double death, to Lethe's pools, Despis'd ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 565 - Vol. 20, No. 565., Saturday, September 8, 1832 • Various
... neither an allegorist nor an imitator; and, consequently, he alone has introduced the ancient fictions with effect. His Minos, his Charon, his Pluto, are absolutely terrific. Nothing can be more beautiful or original than the use which he has made of the River of Lethe. He has never assigned to his mythological characters any functions inconsistent with the creed of the Catholic Church. He has related nothing concerning them which a good Christian of that age might not believe possible. On this account there is nothing in these passages ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Contibutions to Knight's Quarterly Magazine] • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with eclat he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no Lethe for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutral, godlike independence! Who can thus lose all pledge and, having observed, observe again from the same unaffected, unbiased, unbribable, unaffrighted innocence, must always be formidable, must always engage the poet's ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... before when they had been at school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... to think of it. When they knelt upon the turf beside some crystal brook, and drank of the water which seemed red wine or molten gold according to the nature of the trees above it, it might have been the water of Lethe. ...
— Prisoners of Hope - A Tale of Colonial Virginia • Mary Johnston
... his own vocation. The talent is the call." It is no small thing, in this grim world, to make people smile, to be absurd for their alleviation, to render all things "sympathetically ridiculous" for a time, to bear in a chalice of mirth the water of Lethe. If one's talent lies that way, why, the call should be clear! The Penguin Person should have no doubt or shame of his vocation, nor should anyone else allow him to. Little Joe Weber, who was on the stage the most perfect ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... 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 ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... the cold 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, ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... man service in his utmost extremity; science had perfected its instruments, but one link in the chain was fallible man. The bell would tinkle—the watcher would be laughing out of earshot—and the life would sink back into Lethe after ...
— The Son of Clemenceau • Alexandre (fils) Dumas
... what you shall do when you get there. You are half-tired, half-ashamed, of making one more in the ignoble army of idlers, who saunter about the cliffs, and sands, and quays; to whom every wharf is but a "wharf of Lethe," by which they rot "dull as the oozy weed." You foreknow your doom by sad experience. A great deal of dressing, a lounge in the club-room, a stare out of the window with the telescope, an attempt to take a bad sketch, a walk up one parade and down ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... last something of the same kind happens with himself. Had he, on his way hither from the convent, passed unwittingly through some river or rivulet of Lethe, that had carried away from him all his so carefully accumulated intellectual baggage of fact and theory? The hard and abstract laws, or theory of the laws, of music, of the stars, of mechanical structure, in hard and abstract formulae, adding ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... soldier had passed—until some future need of him stirred the emotions of a selfish people. This new world moved on unmindful, through its travail and incalculable change, to unknown ends. He, Daren Lane, had been left alone on the vast and naked shores of Lethe. ...
— The Day of the Beast • Zane Grey
... rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the wide, primeval limits Bound neat villages and districts. There are Bryantsville and Fitchport, Buckeye, Logan Town and Tyro, Duncan Town and Buena Vista, Hyattville, Paint Lick, and Lowell, Clustered round the ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... by 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
... 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
... Steals drowsily and musically Into the univeral valley. The rosemary nods upon the grave; The lily lolls upon the wave; Wrapping the fog about its breast, The ruin moulders into rest; Looking like Lethe, see! the lake A conscious slumber seems to take, And would not, for the world, awake. All Beauty sleeps!—and lo! where lies (Her easement open to the ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... refined in his attentions to excite the attention of anyone so stupid and obtuse. It was not the least of the Duchess's mortifications to be constantly contrasting her former lover—elegant, captivating, and spirituel—with her husband, awkward, insipid, and dull, as the fat weed that rots on Lethe's shore. Lord Lindore was indeed the most admired man in London, celebrated for his conquests, his horses, his elegance, manner, dress; in short, in everything he gave the tone. But he had too much taste to carry anything to extreme; and in the midst of incense, ...
— Marriage • Susan Edmonstone Ferrier
... the down, Nigrina black, and Merdamante brown, Vied for his love in jetty bowers below, As Hylas fair was ravish'd long ago. Then sung, how, shown him by the nut-brown maids; A branch of Styx here rises from the shades, That, tinctured as it runs with Lethe's streams, And wafting vapours from the land of dreams, 340 (As under seas Alpheus' secret sluice Bears Pisa's offerings to his Arethuse,) Pours into Thames: and hence the mingled wave Intoxicates the pert, and lulls the grave: ...
— Poetical Works of Pope, Vol. II • Alexander Pope
... but to be 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 himself ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... had planned to take or the place where I was obliged to call, standing still on the spot, before that steeple, for hours on end, motionless, trying to remember, feeling deep within myself a tract of soil reclaimed from the waters of Lethe slowly drying until the buildings rise on it again; and then no doubt, and then more uneasily than when, just now, I asked him for a direction, I will seek my way again, I will turn a corner... but... the ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... 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
... sleep on! I would not waken yet, Or leave too soon the peaceful realm of dreams! There, lulled by placid Lethe, I forget The tumult raging on Earth's roaring streams; Doubt not that, later, I shall surely meet With steadfast soul Day's ceaseless, sordid strife, But now I crave again that ...
— Poems • John L. Stoddard
... I, Obscurity, The son of Darkness and forgetful Lethe; I, that envy thy brightness, greet thee now, Enforced ...
— The Age of Shakespeare • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... through before rest 'for ever' could in any wise be hoped for — of the things that must be gained and the things that must be lost before that 'for ever' rest could in any sort be looked forward to, — and dismissing the thought, Elizabeth blessed her fragrant moss pillow of Lethe and went ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner
... dissent from his opinions will consider that he was a man of genius, and that the world will take more interest in his slightest word than in the waters of Lethe which are so eagerly prescribed as medicinal for all its wrongs and woe. This drama, however, must not be judged for more than was meant. It is a mere plaything of the imagination; which even may not excite smiles among many, who will ...
— Notes to the Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley • Mary W. Shelley
... and gone, tho' the lamps upon Their face as aforetime gleamed: And his head sunk down, and a Lethe crept O'er his powerful brain, and the ...
— Verses and Translations • C. S. C.
... Chase has drank of the waters of Lethe, how can he possibly look, now, in the face of, for instance, Fessenden of Maine, to whom he has said so many bitter things against the now belauded "Secretary Seward!" Bah! Chase most certainly must have a forty-or-fifty-diplomatist power of commanding—literally ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski
... 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 ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... having once tasted the Lethe of Cherbourg, remained in Paris until the last minute, and stepped from the boat-train to the waiting tender. But the less well-informed came on the day before—and never, for the remainder of their lives, forgot the dulness of their last day in Europe. Then there were the nervously-anxious, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... indifferent, except when 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 ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... 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
... of constitutional philosophies, faith in the ballot-box and such like, has this indignant passage: "If any voice of deliverance or resuscitation reach us, in this our low and all but lost estate, sunk almost beyond plummet's sounding in the mud of Lethe, and oblivious of all noble objects, it will be an intimation that we must put away all this abominable nonsense, and understand, once more, that Constituted Anarchy, with however many ballot-boxes, caucuses, and hustings beer-barrels, is a continual offence to gods ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... 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
... at Babylon. So Thetis shuddered, when the son of Peleus fell transfixed by Paris' coward hand. So I, too, by the banks of murmuring Hebrus followed the head of Orpheus that could not cease from song. So now must thou—out on the mad tyrant's crime!—go down untimely to the wave of Lethe, and while thou singest of war and with lofty strain givest comfort to the sepulchres of the mighty,—O infamy, O monstrous infamy!—art doomed to sudden silence.' So spake she, and with gleaming quill wiped away the ...
— Post-Augustan Poetry - From Seneca to Juvenal • H.E. Butler
... a cataract over the polished amplitudes of bosom and shoulders. Save when feeling shot them with tawny flashes—as waving branches filter mottled sunlight on brown waters—her eyes were dark as the pools of Lethe, wherein men plunge and forget the past. They brought forgetfulness to Paul of his moral tradition, racial pride, the carefully conned apology which he did not remember until, an hour later, he fed her entire stock in trade to his dog. It was better so. Black, brown ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various
... 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? ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson |
