"Lethe" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... light from out my dying eyes, And soul and sense seem slipping soft away, When Death's swift shallop launched on Lethe lies Waiting to wing me to the unknown Gray; When things of time and thought grow strangely dim, And the pent spirit strains to loose its bands Till from the fettered feet and helpless hands Shall fall life's shackles pitiless and grim— Then shall the conflict cease. ...
— The Path of Dreams - Poems • Leigh Gordon Giltner
... had, what looked like a mountain in that subterranean region, rising from the ground, with a stream running at its base. We crossed several rivers; besides the "Echo," one called the "Styx," the other the "Lethe." Our guide had brought a net, with which he caught some fish and crawfish. On examining them we could discover no appearance of eyes, while, from being deprived of the warm rays of the sun, they were perfectly white. Uncle Denis remarked that ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston
... between 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, and their ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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 ...
— The Aeneid • Virgil
... preferred to say little, for she was tired, and made haste to get into bed. It was not long before the subject of their plans and problems and visions of spies and "jam-stained fists" were lost in the lethe ...
— Campfire Girls at Twin Lakes - The Quest of a Summer Vacation • Stella M. Francis
... their side. From all this you will understand how the end of last year could have brought with it no gift more welcome to me than this book. The work has become to me as it were a golden net, wherewith I can recover from out the waves of Lethe the shadowy pictures of my past life, and in that rich draught I am finding my ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... understand—a clear, full voice such as had seldom been heard; my poems were all about the moon sailing in the Empyrean and Death. Death was my strong suit. I sent some of my poems to the local Press, signed 'Lethe,' but I could never hear that ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason
... darkness of a murky cell, Scraping for gold as beasts do in the earth For carrion, and counting life-time out By ducats; closing house and heart alike To the benignant sunshine. If our hearts Could lave in Lethe's cleansing stream sometimes, Till evil vanished from its memory, And left a virgin tablet for the pen Of Nature, life would be as ...
— Eidolon - The Course of a Soul and Other Poems • Walter R. Cassels
... 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 and witty; and Barbin still ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 92, June, 1865 • Various
... to honor 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 grave Of the ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... 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 ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... wild fantastic masses of rock, which loses itself far back in a dim cavern beneath the cliffs. Black and motionless, sullen and inscrutable, it lies, this source of the river Sorgue, a very pool of Lethe, looking as though it knew it drew its sustenance from the deepest heart of the earth, held communication with the hidden powers of Nature, and was one at the core with all the mighty waters of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. July, 1878. • Various
... Tartarus, declare that he did not go down in order that he might chain the three necks, shaggy with serpents, of the monster begotten of Medusa. His business also is settled for all time; he is the terrible, fearless, and watchful janitor, or guardian (janitor or custos) of Orcus, the Styx, Lethe, or the black Kingdom.[9] And so he remains for modern poets, as when Dante, reproducing Virgil, ...
— Cerberus, The Dog of Hades - The History of an Idea • Maurice Bloomfield
... as the Miss-sell-any) was published in 1809, under the title of Imitations and Translations from The Ancient and Modern Classics. Byron contributed nine original poems. The volume was not a success. "It foundered ... in the Gulph of Lethe."—Letter to H. Drury, July 17, 1811, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... spiraled into the air, and the hum of water going slowly was audible. A few minutes of walking brought them to its banks. The stream flowed greasily and dark, some forty yards wide, but in the middle it forked about a spit of sand not more than ten paces broad. It was a very Lethe of a river, running oilily and with a slumberous sound, and its reputation ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... depths, for it reached forward and back in his world-experience, calling into vague, drowsy, fluttering response things that would later awaken to full life, and reanimating the dim and beautiful instincts that are an heritage of that time when the soul is passing the lethe of earliest childhood and retains still a wavering iridescence of the glory from which it has come. The question rose to his lips ready for the asking. He wanted to turn track on the instant, to call for Celia, to demand of her the response to ...
— The Adventures of Bobby Orde • Stewart Edward White
... their leaves, & 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 Gods reward for sufferings Gods cannot know; a throng of empty shades! The endless circle of the year ...
— Proserpine and Midas • Mary Shelley
... a miracle which could ever restore him to those who mourned for him. He had joined that troop of phantom children who come to us in our lonely hours, saying, "We are nothing, less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence ...
— A Vanished Hand • Sarah Doudney
... the nature of the place, and how the rivulet was the Lethe of Paradise;—Lethe, where he stood, but called Eunoe higher up; the drink of the one doing away all remembrance of evil deeds, and that of the other restoring all remembrance of good.[54] It was the region, she said, in which Adam and Eve had lived; ...
— Stories from the Italian Poets: With Lives of the Writers, Volume 1 • Leigh Hunt
... juice.—Ver. 152. Lethe was a river of the infernal regions, whose waters were said to ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... 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 ...
— Gargantua and Pantagruel, Complete. • Francois Rabelais
... stars, colours, and sweet odours, and are sheltered awhile from heaven and hell; then in some moment the bubble bursts, and the god awakens and knows himself, and he rises again with giant strength to conquer; or else he succumbs, and the waves of Lethe, perhaps in mercy, blot ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... thee apt 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
... grape-juice, which gives that 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 ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... Prisoner of war, ever looked 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 ...
— The Works Of Lord Byron, Letters and Journals, Vol. 1 • Lord Byron, Edited by Rowland E. Prothero
... the swain stray Who is by thy beauties undone? To wash their remembrance away, To what distant Lethe must run? The wretch who is sentenced to die May escape, and leave justice behind; From his country perhaps he may fly, But oh! can he fly ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... 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 ...
— The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, • Charles Rollin
... miss, that bring the so nice nose all straight again. This is medicinal, but you do not know how. I put him in your window, I make pretty wreath, and hang him round your neck, so you sleep well. Oh, yes! They, like the lotus flower, make your trouble forgotten. It smell so like the waters of Lethe, and of that fountain of youth that the Conquistadores sought for in the Floridas, and find ...
— Dracula • Bram Stoker
... 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 ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... 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
... said Cortlandt, "that no paradise or heaven described in anything but the Bible compares with this. According to Virgil's description, the joys on the banks of his river Lethe must have been most sad and dreary, the general idleness and monotony apparently being broken only by wrestling matches between the children, while the rest strolled about with laurel wreaths or rested in the shade. The pilot Palinurus, who had been drowned by falling overboard while asleep, ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... if I laugh at any mortal thing, 'T is that I may not weep; and if I weep, 'T is that our nature cannot always bring Itself to apathy, for we must steep[dh] Our hearts first in the depths of Lethe's spring,[di] Ere what we least wish to behold will sleep: Thetis baptized her mortal son in Styx; A mortal ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... me for a broken promise in not joining him: "We are reasonably jolly, but rurally so; going to bed o' nights at ten, and bathing o' mornings at half-past seven; and not drugging ourselves with those dirty and spoiled waters of Lethe that flow round the base of the great pyramid." Then, after mention of the friends who had left him, Sheriff Gordon, the Leeches, Lemon, Egg and Stone: "reflection and pensiveness are coming. I ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... Acheron of sorrow, black and deep; Cocytus, nam'd of lamentation loud Heard on the ruful stream; fierce Phlegeton 580 Whose waves of torrent fire inflame with rage. Farr off from these a slow and silent stream, Lethe the River of Oblivion roules Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks, Forthwith his former state and being forgets, Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain. Beyond this flood a frozen Continent Lies dark and wilde, beat with perpetual ...
— The Poetical Works of John Milton • John Milton
... Who spread, when other methods fail'd, War's bloody banner, and prevail'd. Shall men like these unmention'd sleep Promiscuous with the common heap, And (Gratitude forbid the crime!) Be carried down the stream of time In shoals, unnoticed and forgot, On Lethe's stream, like flags, to rot? 200 No—they shall live, and each fair name, Recorded in the book of Fame, Founded on Honour's basis, fast As the round earth to ages last. Some virtues vanish with our breath; Virtue like this lives after ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... itinerary of Egyptian souls. Very probably similar instruction was given to the initiate at Eleusis. But the Fijians also have a regular theory of what is to be done and avoided on "The Path of the Shades." The shade is ferried by Ceba (Charon) over Wainiyalo (Lethe); he reaches the mystic pandanus tree (here occurs a rite); he meets, and dodges, Drodroyalo and the two devouring Goddesses; he comes to a spring, and drinks, and forgets sorrow at Wai-na-dula, the "Water of Solace." After ...
— The Homeric Hymns - A New Prose Translation; and Essays, Literary and Mythological • Andrew Lang
... beauty, lust with both! Tie up the libertine in a field of feasts, Keep his brain fuming; Epicurean cooks Sharpen with cloyless sauce his appetite; That sleep and feeding may prorogue his honour Even till a Lethe'd dullness. ...
— Antony and Cleopatra • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... 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 intrigues, ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... seem to have drunk from the spring of Lethe," said Benedetto, contemptuously. "Anselmo, have you forgotten our ...
— The Son of Monte-Cristo, Volume II (of 2) • Alexandre Dumas pere
... 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 Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... what magic encircles that spot In the feminine mind of the West! There, it seems, Waits the realization of beautiful dreams. There the waters of Lethe unceasingly roll, With blessed forgetfulness free to each soul, While the doorways that lead to success open wide, With Fame in the distance to beckon and guide. Mirth lurks in each byway, and Folly herself Wears the look of a semi-respectable elf, And is to be courted and trusted when ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... 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
... is unchristian, for it has no day of rest. Generally I think that my disease has its seat in the abdomen or in the waist. Mineral waters I can no more drink this summer. But is there not a mineral water which is called Lethe? ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... is pretended they lose the remembrance of all former things, even of their parents, treasure, and language, as if they had drunk of the water of oblivion, drawn out of the lake of Lethe. When they have been in this condition as long as their custom directs, they lessen this intoxicating potion; and, by degrees, the young men recover the use of their senses; but before they are quite well, they ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... 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 ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... enough that pride may urge Thy claims to memory's grateful lore, And boast, as rapt from Lethe's surge, The Suliote and ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, May 1844 - Volume 23, Number 5 • Various
... 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
... maintain there is 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. Our insanity has only a little more ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume VI • Various
... weeping mute, To angry gods the scorn and prey, But tasted of the charmed fruit, And cast despair itself away; So, while unto thy lips, its shore, This stream of life enchanted flows, Remember'd grief, that stung before, Sinks down to Lethe's calm repose. So, while unto thy lips, its shore, The stream of life enchanted flows— Drown'd deep in Lethe's calm repose, The grief ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various
... no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, That all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, That all novelty is but oblivion. Whereby you may see, that the river of Lethe runneth as well above ground as below. There is an abstruse astrologer that saith, If it were not for two things that are constant (the one is, that the fixed stars ever stand a like distance one from another, and never come nearer ...
— Essays - The Essays Or Counsels, Civil And Moral, Of Francis Ld. - Verulam Viscount St. Albans • Francis Bacon
... 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 near him. He felt fearfully for his ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... that we deplore, and with many actions that we bitterly repent; still, in the most checkered life, I firmly think there are so many little rays of sunshine to look back upon that I do not believe any mortal would deliberately drain a goblet of the waters of Lethe if he ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou
... 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
... able to sustain the physical cost of the trek of more than a thousand miles under 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, ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... 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 ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... 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 ...
— Henry Brocken - His Travels and Adventures in the Rich, Strange, Scarce-Imaginable Regions of Romance • Walter J. de la Mare
... "Yes, Lethe," smiled Wiesike. "It's a pity that while the ancient Swedes, the Greeks, were leaving us the name they did not leave us also the ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... 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
... 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.
... 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
... truth couched in that old proverb, Once an old man, and twice a child. Now if any one be curious to understand what course I take to effect this alteration, my method is this: I bring them to my well of forgetfulness, (the fountain whereof is in the Fortunate Islands, and the river Lethe in hell but a small stream of it), and when they have there filled their bellies full, and washed down care, by the virtue and operation whereof they ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... handed over to their rightful owner, but not in time, as Willis complained, to keep him from going down to posterity astride the finis to Pericles and Aspasia. Long afterwards he expressed his hope that Landor's biographers would either let him slip off at Lethe's wharf, or else do him justice in a note. Before this unfortunate incident, Landor and Willis had corresponded on cordial terms. The old poet wrote to say how much he envied his correspondent the evenings he passed in the society of 'the most accomplished and graceful of all our fashionable world, ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston
... 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 ...
— English Literature For Boys And Girls • H.E. Marshall
... 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 ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... own before us, Siegmund!' she scolded. 'The mist is Lethe. It is enough for us if its spell ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... melodious moan. I dreamt I saw thee, robed in purple flakes, Break amorous through the clouds, as morning breaks, And, swiftly as a bright Phoebean dart, Strike for the Cretan isle; and here thou art! Too gentle Hermes, hast thou found the maid?" Whereat the star of Lethe not delay'd His rosy eloquence, and thus inquired: "Thou smooth-lipp'd serpent, surely high inspired! Thou beauteous wreath, with melancholy eyes, Possess whatever bliss thou canst devise, Telling me only where ...
— Lamia • John Keats
... that man harries Is love of the Best; Yawns the pit of the Dragon, Lit by rays from the Blest. The Lethe of Nature Can't trance him again, Whose soul sees the perfect, Which ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... song, And yet 'twas ever, ever new, With magic in its heaven-tuned string— The future bliss thy constant theme. Oh! then each little woe took wing Away, like phantoms of a dream; As if each sound That flutter'd round, Had floated over Lethe's stream! ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... 7-1/5 cents! And a mass of Loewenbraeu, twice the size of the seidel sold in this country at twenty cents, for forty pfennigs (9-1/2 cents)! An inviting and appetizing spot, believe me. A place to stretch your legs. A temple of Lethe. There, when my days of moneylust are over, I go to chew my memories and dream my dreams and listen ...
— Europe After 8:15 • H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan and Willard Huntington Wright
... through the day Comes the glad sound of children at their play: O sad, and sweet, and silent! surely here A man might dwell apart from troublous fear, Watching the tide of seasons as they flow From amorous Spring to Winter's rain and snow, And have no thought of sorrow;—here, indeed, Are Lethe's waters, and that fatal weed Which makes a man forget ...
— Poems • Oscar Wilde
... still wonderfully 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 I imagined." ...
— The Red Redmaynes • Eden Phillpotts
... customers. Then, again, let us never forget that the temptation to drink is strongest when want is sharpest and misery the most acute. A well-fed man is not driven to drink by the craving that torments the hungry; and the comfortable do not crave for the boon of forgetfulness. Gin is the only Lethe of the miserable. The foul and poisoned air of the dens in which thousands live predisposes to a longing for stimulant. Fresh air, with its oxygen and its ozone, being lacking, a man supplies the want with spirit. After ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... 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
... it banishes all manner of cares, and makes us entirely forget them, producing the same effect as the waters of the River Lethe on those souls which were destined to ...
— Ebrietatis Encomium - or, the Praise of Drunkenness • Boniface Oinophilus
... "It is Lethe," she said obstinately, "and you shall not deny it to me. I tell you I am weary of my thoughts, and all the business of this River of yours. I have gained the bank; it is philosophy. Before I am driven far Inland—where even you cannot ...
— In the Border Country • Josephine Daskam Bacon
... only true regarding the Christian. It is here where the true and the false—Christianity and Paganism—meet together in impressive and significant contrast. The one comes to the dark river with her pale, sickly lamp. It refuses to burn—the damps of Lethe dim and quench it. Philosophy tries to discourse on death as a "stern necessity"—of the duty of passing heroically into this mysterious, oblivion-world—taking with bold heart "the leap in the dark," and confronting, as we best can, blended images ...
— Memories of Bethany • John Ross Macduff
... 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
... blame Too 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 much: ...
— The Princess • Alfred Lord Tennyson
... 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
... 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 ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... worshipped. The ice congealed about our heart melts. Wild tears of anguish break from us, and we bow our forehead to the ground, for we know that we have sinned. When we have done penance, and are purified, and have drunk of the fountain of Lethe and bathed in the fountain of Eunoe, the mistress of our soul raises us to the Paradise of Heaven. Out of that eternal pearl, the moon, the face of Piccarda Donati leans to us. Her beauty troubles us for a moment, and when, like ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— The Glory of English Prose - Letters to My Grandson • Stephen Coleridge
... dazzling electric signs, partook of the characteristics of the inhabitants, who seemed overdressed and vulgarly ostentatious. The gaudily trapped saloons, cafes, and music halls, spoke a similar message. This was the recreation spot of the people of the quarter; their land of lethe. So near were the saloons and drinking gardens that from their open doorways there came a pungent odor of beer. Every place had instrumental music of some kind. Mandolins and guitars, in the hands of gentlemen ...
— Ben Blair - The Story of a Plainsman • Will Lillibridge
... 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 else is gone. Where ...
— The Wings of Icarus - Being the Life of one Emilia Fletcher • Laurence Alma Tadema
... regards the human will, is as sure in Determination as it is in Consciousness. Habit is as inevitable as Memory; and as nothing can be forgotten, but, when once known, is known forever,—so nothing is done but will be done again. Lethe and Annihilation are only myths upon the earth, which men, though suspicious of their eternal falsehood, name to themselves in moments of despair and fearful apprehension. The poppy has only a fabled virtue; but, like Persephone, we have all tasted ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... 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 way ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... 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 Mary Carmichael and the fat lady to scan the horizon for the delinquent Chugg, and incidentally ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... The effect of her rebuke is the overwhelming of 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 ...
— Dante: "The Central Man of All the World" • John T. Slattery
... 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
... my breast, Her snowy bosom bare, and sing'd her breast. Her beryl-ring retain'd the fiery rays, Spread the pale flame, and shot the funeral blaze; As late stretch'd out the bloodless spectre stood, And her dead lips were wet with Lethe's flood. She breath'd her soul, sent forth her voice aloud, And chaf'd her hands ...
— Miscellanies upon Various Subjects • John Aubrey
... great gurgling kisses, which made one shudder and think involuntarily of the "slime which the aspic leaves upon the caves of Nile." Many of us have been Anglo-Indian babies. Was there a time when we suffered caresses such as these? What a happy thing it is that Lethe flows over us as we emerge from infancy, and blots out all that was before. Another question has been stirring in my mind since that scene. What feeling or motive prompted those luscious blandishments? Was it simple hypocrisy? I do not think so. The pure hypocrite is much rarer than shallow ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... 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
... it. These are the great lovers. It seemed to Jean now that it mattered little whether this grey hour of rain and silence preluded life or death. Presently they would come to the edge of the stream called Lethe, and then he, making a cup of his hands, would give the woman he loved to drink of the waters of forgetfulness, and all remembrance of loneliness and tears, and of the pain that ached now in his side and in her shot breast ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... was a very great consumption. As for drinkables, the temperance 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 ...
— A Select Party (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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
... 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
... 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... possess in common with ourselves. Homer and aeschylus, and Sophocles, and Phidias, live not by the sacred in them, but by the human: and, but for this common bond, Hellenic art would have been submerged in the same Lethe that has drowned the Indian, Egyptian, and Assyrian Theogonies and arts. And, if we except form, what other thing does Hellenic art offer to the modern artist, that is not thoroughly opposed to his faith, wants, ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • 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 ...
— A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. IX • Various
... to have been dipt in Lethe lake, Could save the sonne of Thetis from to die; But that blinde bard did him immortall make 430 With verses dipt in deaw of Castalie: Which made the Easterne conquerour to crie, O fortunate yong man! whose vertue found So brave ...
— The Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, Volume 5 • Edmund Spenser
... 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 ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... another. And at the moment Vane was faced with the latter. The doctor had talked airily of three or four months, and after that in all probability a spell of light duty, and to Vane that seemed like a permanency. It is one thing to drug oneself in the waters of Lethe for a fortnight of one's own free will: it is altogether different to be drugged by others for good. And dimly he felt that either he or they would have to go under. Two totally incompatible people cannot sit next one another at dinner for long without letting some course ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... too often rest! The latest power of nature had been harnessed to do 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
... James's-market, and resign their throats to the victors. I am determined to see them dead first, lest they should play me a trick, and be hobbling to Buckingham-house, while I am shivering and waiting for them on the banks of Lethe. Adieu! Yours, Horatius. ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... again to meet! Till then I fain would sleep; My longings and my thoughts to steep In Lethe's waters dark and deep. My loved one I again shall see, There's rapture in the thought! In the hope tomorrow of thee, My ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VIII • Various
... daughters Venus' anger feel, Filling their urns at Lethe all in vain;— And there's the wretch who would my Delia steal, And wish me ...
— The Elegies of Tibullus • Tibullus
... subdued their wild, free rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the wide, primeval limits Bound neat villages and districts. There are Bryantsville and Fitchport, Buckeye, Logan Town and Tyro, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... 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. I see ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... there the frescoes started out in the slant of the sunrise like dead faces floating to the surface of a river. Dead faces, yes: plaintive spectres of his childish fears and longings, lost in the harsh daylight of experience. He had forgotten the very dreams they stood for: Lethe flowed between and only one voice reached across the torrent. It was that of Saint ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... rock before us, and sometimes rowing near enough to a cottage on the bank, though they were few and far between, to see the sunflowers, and the seed vessels of the poppy, like small goblets filled with the water of Lethe, before the door, but without disturbing the sluggish household behind. Thus we held on, sailing or dipping our way along with the paddle up this broad river, smooth and placid, flowing over concealed rocks, where we could see the pickerel lying low in the transparent water, eager to double ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... until he suddenly comes to his old, solitary, bachelor self, and finds that they were but dream-children who might have been, but never were. "We are nothing," they say to him; "less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and we must wait upon the tedious shore of Lethe, millions of ages, before we have existence and a name." "And immediately awaking," he says, "I found myself in my arm chair." The dream- children whom I would now raise, if I could, before every one of you, according to your various circumstances, should ...
— Speeches: Literary and Social • Charles Dickens
... but no dawn rise to breathe upon these living banks of wild violet, and woodbine, and rose; nor call to you, through your casement,—call (not giving you the name of the English poet's lady, but the name of Dante's great Matilda, who on the edge of happy Lethe, stood ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... interpose Thy soothing wings betwixt me and my care. These eyes, which seem in love with weeping, close! And make my senses for a time thy bower, That whilst I sleep I may my sorrows lose. I do not crave that thou the wand of power, Three times in Lethe dipp'd, at me shouldst shake, And all my senses sprinkle o'er and o'er; Let souls, more fortunate, thereof partake— Of languid rest a portion scant and slight, My weary, wandering eyes content will make. Now all the world is hush'd; to ...
— Targum • George Borrow
... with crested head, never there calls aloud to Aurora, nor watchful dog, nor more sagacious goose disturbs the silence. No wild beast, nor cattle, nor branch moved with the wind, nor sound of human conversation, breaks the stillness. Silence reigns there; but from the bottom of the rock the River Lethe flows, and by its murmur invites to sleep. Poppies grow abundantly before the door of the cave, and other herbs, from whose juices Night collects slumbers, which she scatters over the darkened earth. There is no gate to the mansion, to creak on its hinges, nor any watchman; ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... valley of sweet waters, were to know Earth paved like Heaven; and to seem such to me Even now what wants thy stream?—that it should Lethe be: * * * * * * * But o'er the blacken'd memory's blighting dream Thy waves would vainly roll, all sweeping ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... Her face I cannot see, for she keeps for ever behind me. 29. Who is this Woman that beckoneth and warneth me from the Place where she is, and in whose Eyes is Woeful remembrance? I guess who she is. [big cross] 30. Cagot and Cressida. 31. Lethe and Anapaula. 32. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with Curious ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... amid a hollow dale meanwhile AEneas sees A secret grove, a thicket fair, with murmuring of the trees, And Lethe's stream that all along that quiet place doth wend; O'er which there hovered countless folks and peoples without end: And as when bees amid the fields in summer-tide the bright Settle on diverse flowery things, and round the lilies white Go streaming; ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... the canoe, and now, after draining to the dregs the cup of bitterness she had forced on herself during these later days, here she was, ready as ever to quaff the love potion. Poor Elsie! She longed for the waters of Lethe; haply they are denied to young women with live ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... emitted its feeble cry. Up here the heat was tempered by a pleasant breeze. Mr. Hoopdriver was possessed by unreasonable contentment; he lit himself a cigarette and lounged more comfortably. Surely the Sussex ale is made of the waters of Lethe, of poppies and pleasant dreams. Drowsiness coiled ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... hand that held the draught of Lethe—which in another moment she would have swallowed—she caught at her husband's hand, pulled the glass out of it, and then with a little sigh she dropped senseless on the floor of the conning-tower. Redgrave looked for a moment in the ...
— A Honeymoon in Space • George Griffith
... 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 of gin. ...
— Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome
... alike - and easily can I now conceive the disappointment and mortification of poor Mr. Garrick when he read "Lethe" to a royal audience. Its tameness must have tamed even him, and I doubt not he never acquitted himself so ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay
... and let my battle cease; I care not where I stay nor when I go; For action gives unhappiness and woe, But Lethe brings forgetfulness and peace; A birth, a life, a ...
— Oklahoma and Other Poems • Freeman E. Miller
... 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
... reminding Stephen of years before when they had been at school together in Conmee's time. He asked about Glaucon, Alcibiades, Pisistratus. Where were they now? Neither knew. You have spoken of the past and its phantoms, Stephen said. Why think of them? If I call them into life across the waters of Lethe will not the poor ghosts troop to my call? Who supposes it? I, Bous Stephanoumenos, bullockbefriending bard, am lord and giver of their life. He encircled his gadding hair with a coronal of vineleaves, smiling at Vincent. That answer and those leaves, Vincent said to him, will adorn you more fitly ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... c. 34. Leunclavius Hist. Turcica Mussulmanica, l. xv. p. 577. Under the Greek empire these castles were used as state prisons, under the tremendous name of Lethe, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 2 • Edward Gibbon
... 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, ...
— The Destroyer - A Tale of International Intrigue • Burton Egbert Stevenson
... 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, that I live in a more agreeable variety than you ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... the glass her doom was dight. There was a little star-like purple flower, such as never grew on land or sea, nestling in the golden darkness of the fur. It seemed to April a flower that might have been plucked from the slopes of the blue hills of Nirvana, or found floating on the still waters of Lethe in that land where it is always afternoon. It brought dreams of romance to her heart, and made starry flowers of its own colour blossom in her eyes. She crushed the hat softly down upon her dark, winging hair, ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... mountain top, Steals drowsily and musically Into the universal 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 casement open to the skies) ...
— Edgar Allan Poe's Complete Poetical Works • Edgar Allan Poe
... with compressed lips and gloomy eyes. Finally he came to a stand before a card table, set full in the ruddy light of the fire, and taking up the cards ran them slowly through his fingers. "When the lotus was all plucked and Lethe drained, then cards were born into the world," he said sententiously. "Come, my ...
— Audrey • Mary Johnston
... spark: and when the heart thrillingly conceives, its children-thoughts are as arrows from the hand of the giant, flying through that mental world—the hearts of other men. Fervent still from its hot internal source, this fountain gushes up; no sluggish Lethe-stream is here, dull, forgetful, and forgotten; but liker to the burning waves of Phlegethon, mingling at times (though its fire is still unquenched), with the pastoral rills of Tempe, and the River ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... and custom so swift of foot had made, He never rested, but ran evermore. And with his coming he did use his trade; A heap of names within his cloak he bare, And in the river did them all unlade; Or, to say truth, away he cast them all Into this stream, which Lethe we do call. This prodigal old wretch no sooner came Unto this cursed river's barren bank, But desperately, without all fear of blame, Or caring to deserve reward or thank, He hurl'd therein full ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19, No. 528, Saturday, January 7, 1832 • Various
... 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." ...
— Tales of Fantasy and Fact • Brander Matthews
... them. So low he fell that all means for his salvation were already short, save showing him the lost people.[32] For this I visited the gate of the dead, and to him, who has conducted him up hither, my prayers were borne with weeping. The high decree of God would be broken, if Lethe should be passed, and such viands should be tasted without any scot of repentance ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... 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
... mythologies relate, Some draught of Lethe might await The slipping thro' from state ...
— The Early Poems of Alfred Lord Tennyson • Tennyson
... 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. ...
— White Slaves • Louis A Banks |
