"Oblivion" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... village life as it might be, than to reflect on what it has suffered from man's inhumanity to man. What made Crabbe a now force in English poetry, was that in his verse Pity appears, after a long oblivion, as the true antidote to Sentimentalism. The reader is not put off with pretty imaginings, but is led up to the object which the poet would show him, and made to feel its horror. If Crabbe is our first great realist in verse, he uses his realism ...
— Crabbe, (George) - English Men of Letters Series • Alfred Ainger
... expected, he died a beggar somewhere in Pennsylvania, little thinking that, by a singular coincidence, one of his productions (the "Manuscript found"), redeemed from oblivion by a few rogues, would prove in their hands a powerful weapon, and be the basis of one of the most anomalous, yet powerful secessions which has ever been experienced by ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... write the Romance of the Rose, he adjusted this allegorical handling to the purposes of love-poetry with an ingenious intricacy never before attained. It has been the fashion almost ever since the famous Romance was rescued from the ignorant and contemptuous oblivion into which it had fallen, to praise Jean de Meung's part at the expense of that due to William of Lorris. But this is hard to justify either on directly aesthetic or on historical principles of criticism. In the first place, there can be no question that, vitally as he changed ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... from camp to camp, wrapped in his own thoughts, keeping his own counsel. Yet he alone of that little band, unless you except Mark Twain, possessed the divine spark we call "genius." Centuries after the names of all the rest are buried in oblivion, Bret Harte's stories of the Argonauts in the mining towns of California will remain the classics they ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... Him whose paths are in the great deep, and His ways past finding out? At least, the greater part of his influence on the times which have followed him, is to be ascribed to that very "Radicalism" which in the eyes of the respectable around him, had sealed his doom, and consigned him to ignoble oblivion. It has been, with the working men who read him, a passport for the rest of his writings; it has allured them to listen to him, when he spoke of high and holy things, which but for him, they might have long ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... obliged to ascend a flight of stairs, now again to descend. The architect certainly deserves great praise for having managed so cleverly to unite all these holy places under one roof; and St. Helena has performed a most meritorious action in thus rescuing from oblivion the sacred sites in ...
— A Visit to the Holy Land • Ida Pfeiffer
... were possible. In one of his own beautiful phrases Vauvenargues says, "The earliest days of spring have less charm than the budding virtue of a young man," In his own case those "earliest days" are hopelessly sunken into oblivion.[17] ...
— Three French Moralists and The Gallantry of France • Edmund Gosse
... stronger party of dissemblers gradually lose thereby their chance of fame in letters. Sound writing cannot survive in the air of mechanical hypocrisy. They with their enormous modern audiences are the hacks doomed to oblivion. We, under the modern silence, are the inheritors of those who built up the political greatness of England upon a foundation of free speech, and of the prose which it begets. Those who prefer to sell themselves or to be cowed gain, as a rule, not even that ephemeral ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc
... along the road toward him, to seize him in a resistless grasp, and send him to some awful fate; or, if not that, at any rate to administer to him some tremendous blow, like that catapultian kick, which would hurl him in an instant into oblivion. ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... sorrow hath shut me safe in love's divine, And to spread wing and fly in the outer air Were most impossible failure, if I strove To fail so. But I look on thee—on thee— Beholding, besides love, the end of love, Hearing oblivion beyond memory; As one who sits and gazes from above, Over the ...
— The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Volume IV • Elizabeth Barrett Browning
... articles other women wrote, she did not even understand what they were about. No, she was a failure surely, she told herself. This little song was like her acting on the school stage in the old days at home. She had promised to be a star and had suddenly set in oblivion. ...
— 'Lizbeth of the Dale • Marian Keith
... increasingly shabby small house in town would become a thing of the past. And what then? Could any one wonder she said to herself that she could have beaten Joan furiously. It would not matter to any one else if they dropped out of the world into squalid oblivion—oh, she knew that—she knew that with bitter certainty!—but oh, how it would matter to them!—at least to herself. It was all very well for Mudie's to pour forth streams of sentimental novels preaching the horrors of girls marrying for money, but what were you to do—what in heaven's ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... from the banquet. As in the legend, when the murderer's finger touched the gaping wound the blood began again to flow—a silent witness against the unsuspected but guilty friend, so Herod's conscience opened up again his guilty secret. Memory, thrusting a hooked pole into "the ocean of oblivion, brought up the pale and drowned deed." The long-forgotten sin was revealed in all its ghastly atrocity. It availed nothing that Herod was a Sadducee—the agnostic of antiquity. For, when conscience spake, all his doubts fell ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... at his coming? Do as thou wilt, but I will tell thee of the better way. Now that goodly Odysseus hath wreaked vengeance on the wooers, let them make a firm covenant together with sacrifice, and let him be king all his days, and let us bring about oblivion of the slaying of their children and their brethren; so may both sides love one another as of old, and let peace and wealth abundant be ...
— DONE INTO ENGLISH PROSE • S. H. BUTCHER, M.A.
... follow them, thinking that they would return as usual with the flood tide.[774] But for these conspiring circumstances New France might have lived a little longer, and the fruitless heroism of Wolfe would have passed, with countless other heroisms, into oblivion. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman
... would be able to enjoy and that, among other delights, there would be the woods; as however, her afternoon walk had only lain through the fields, her mind was now absorbed with the one idea—"where was the wood?"—to the oblivion ...
— Lola - The Thought and Speech of Animals • Henny Kindermann
... of his protegee, who outlived her friend and critic but a few months. With the great and good about him, Landor sleeps well. His genius needs no eulogy: good wine needs no bush. Time, that hides the many in oblivion, can but add to the warmth and mellowness of his fame; and in the days to come no modern writer will be more faithfully studied or more largely quoted ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 104, June, 1866 • Various
... point of Louisiana, which I occupy, is of great importance in the present crisis. I tender my services to defend it; and the only reward I ask is that a stop be put to the proscription against me and my adherents, by an act of oblivion, for all ...
— Famous Privateersmen and Adventurers of the Sea • Charles H. L. Johnston
... Time can only bring this to a land, which in her agony, bled at every pore. Time, the healer of all wounds will bring it yet. The day will come, when the evil passions of the great civil strife will sleep in oblivion, and North and South do justice to each other's motives, and forget each other's wrongs. Then History will speak with clear voice of the deeds done on either side, and the citizens of the whole Union do justice to the memories of the dead." Surely all honest men and true patriots will ...
— The Narrative of a Blockade-Runner • John Wilkinson
... the spot, and horror, like a presence, rose from the void, and beckoned her down to oblivion. Why not? Why not? The question of despair seemed, like a vast pendulum, to swing her to and fro between the sky and the blackness, so that, blind and deaf and dumb, she felt only the horror, and ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... found to be in a three-story frame house, and when they got there the flames were already coming out of the upper windows; but the strangest thing about the fire was that the inhabitants of the house, if there were any, seemed to be in utter oblivion that their house was on fire for not a person was in sight about the place and all the doors and ...
— Billy Whiskers - The Autobiography of a Goat • Frances Trego Montgomery
... by means and procedures which have not fitted him for the position of a German deputy, and do not lend him any force, either moral or material, for his new elective office. The whole of his great edifice is founded on a complete oblivion of parliamentary traditions, to-day courted lovingly by its most crafty enemy, whose inconstancy is extraordinary. Reservedness, dissimulation, secrecy, deceit, double meanings in words, what by analogy ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... graceful, thoughtfully conceived, adequately completed. Yet I knew very well that they were like ripples upon the water, creatures without lasting forms or shape, images passing as easily as they had come into the mists of oblivion. The human touch, the transforming fire of life was wholly wanting. These April creations of my brain—carnival figures, laughing and weeping with equal facility, lacked always and altogether the blood and muscle of human creatures. ...
— The Master Mummer • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... successful men, that did not succeed well at what they first undertook, but they profited by their efforts in different directions, and this fitted them for higher things, whereas had they refused to adjust themselves to their environment, the tide of progress would have swept them into oblivion. ...
— The Power of Concentration • Theron Q. Dumont
... than by the ordinary means. Yet it must not be forgotten that the thieves' jargon was invented for that purpose, whilst the Rommany, originally the proper and only speech of a particular nation, has been preserved from falling into entire disuse and oblivion, because adapted to answer the same end. It was impossible to treat of the Rommany in a manner calculated to exhaust the subject, and to leave no ground for future cavilling, without devoting a considerable space to the consideration of the robber dialect, on which account ...
— The Zincali - An Account of the Gypsies of Spain • George Borrow
... place on all the earth. Would it be any the brighter for me that I threw clouds over their spirits? Would they more truly sympathize with me, because I was for ever pouring complaints into their ears? Oh no. I try to make them forget that I suffer, and, in their forgetfulness, I often find a sweet oblivion. I love them all too well to ...
— Finger Posts on the Way of Life • T. S. Arthur
... starve a woman's heart, to bid her find her level among broiderers of bannerets and stitchers in tapestry. Ah! if the particular God who happened to be at the digging of us out of the happier pit of oblivion had only made me a man, I, at least, should neither have been a straitlaced Jackanapes nor yet a ...
— Red Axe • Samuel Rutherford Crockett
... harmony of colouring of those delicate pavements and tesserae with which these wonderful people loved to adorn their habitations. Since this strange discovery the diligent research of one man has rescued from oblivion, and the liberality of another now protects from further injury, one of the best specimens of a Roman country house to be found in England. Far away from the haunts of men, in the depths of the Chedworth ...
— A Cotswold Village • J. Arthur Gibbs
... Artaxerxes to observe these days, and celebrate them as festivals, and to deliver them down to posterity, that this festival might continue for all time to come, and that it might never be buried in oblivion; for since they were about to be destroyed on these days by Haman, they would do a right thing, upon escaping the danger in them, and on them inflicting punishment on their enemies, to observe those days, ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... There was an old French Cure at one end of the compartment, who, quite early in the evening, drew out a silk handkerchief and covered his head and face therewith, leading us to suppose that he had sunk into oblivion. We therefore carried on a very pleasant and vivacious conversation, as the night was warm and we were not inclined to sleep. Suddenly the old Cure pulled off the handkerchief and said in a gruff voice, ...
— The Great War As I Saw It • Frederick George Scott
... under the authority of Uncle, the Prince, the Seeker, and all mankind will be swept into oblivion; and, until such time as she can be married profitably and to her master's liking, she will know no man. The cruelest awakening she will face is the attitude of the Orient toward the innocent offspring in ...
— The Lady and Sada San - A Sequel to The Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... violin aloft, he cried exultingly: "Henceforth thou art mine, though death and oblivion lurk ever ...
— The Fifth String, The Conspirators • John Philip Sousa
... that the very existence of such a Periodical might be the means of leading Clergymen, in their pastoral intercourse, to be more observant of character, more discriminating in their views of human nature, and more disposed to record and rescue from oblivion striking conversations and facts. No species of knowledge can be more interesting or more useful, than that thus drawn from real life;—especially from portions of life most intimately connected with spiritual and eternal realities. If it is all-important that masters in surgery and medicine record, ...
— The National Preacher, Vol. 2 No. 7 Dec. 1827 • Aaron W. Leland and Elihu W. Baldwin
... floated in and out wearing tantalizing garments of oblivion. They seemed about to dance, then vanished. They reappeared half a dozen times, but never unveiled their faces. The imp Curiosity pulled Memory by the sleeve and said, "Why do they run away? 'Tis strange knavery!" Out ran Memory to capture them. After a great deal of racing and puffing ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... was completely sure. Her wound was the seal God set upon her soul. It was easy enough now for her to achieve detachment, oblivion of Walter Majendie, to pour out her whole soul in the prayer for light: "Lighten our darkness, we beseech Thee, O Lord, and by Thy great mercy defend us from all perils and ...
— The Helpmate • May Sinclair
... others whom we might mention, who have stamped the English literature with the sign-manual of their genius, and whose names will be held in remembrance and honour long after those of the most distinguished lawyers of the age shall have passed to the limbo of oblivion. Advocates who also followed the profession of litterateurs, and were addicted to belles lettres, often experienced unfair treatment at the hands of the agents or writers by whom counsel is usually retained. They were not considered safe men. And if they were not ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans
... purer realms above: Their father is the Olympian Jove. Ne'er shall oblivion veil their front sublime, Th' indwelling god is great, nor fears ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... and easily than from any living man, and a little because I want to get rid of Shakespeare by assimilating all that was fine in him, while giving all that was common and vicious in him as spoil to oblivion. He is like the Old-Man-of-the-Sea on the shoulders of our youth; he has become an obsession to the critic, a weapon to the pedant, a nuisance to the man of genius. True, he has painted great pictures in a superb, romantic fashion; he is the Titian of dramatic art: but is there ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... framework of our social and political system, that law may have an uninterrupted sway; then shall we be a united, prosperous, and contented people, and the reign of lawless agitators, bribery-mongers, and counterfeit statesmen will have passed away into the oblivion and obscurity of a more ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson
... faithfully through all the battles on the Lakes, and in the battle of Lake Erie rendered most effective service. Once more the artist has rescued from oblivion the heroism of the Negroes; for in the East Senate stairway of the Capitol at Washington, and in the rotunda of the Capitol at Columbus, in the celebrated picture of Perry's Victory on Lake Erie, a Negro sailor has a ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... weak and not beautiful, and life as it goes somehow such an outrageous fizzle. Why are there such beautiful things, conceptions, possibilities only to be ruined by fatal microbes this human nature puts into it? Life only in yearning; Death to crown realization; peace only in oblivion. What for? And even the power of renounciation has ...
— Nelka - Mrs. Helen de Smirnoff Moukhanoff, 1878-1963, a Biographical Sketch • Michael Moukhanoff
... become familiar without ceasing to be strange. On the other hand, if in music to be great is always to be misunderstood, it is no less true, here as elsewhere, that to be misunderstood is not always to be great. And music may be merely strange, and pass into oblivion, without ever having passed that stage of surprised and delighted acceptance which is the test of ...
— The Psychology of Beauty • Ethel D. Puffer
... of our late privation and dreadful sufferings, and we began to remember what had passed rather as a frightful dream from which we had been happily awakened, than as events which had taken place in sober and naked reality. I have since found that this species of partial oblivion is usually brought about by sudden transition, whether from joy to sorrow or from sorrow to joy—the degree of forgetfulness being proportioned to the degree of difference in the exchange. Thus, in my own case, I now ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 3 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... the highest esteem, and imitated and even surpassed him in his own eccentric career. He had also innumerable imitators in Italy, many of whom attained a high reputation during their lives, and afterwards sank into complete oblivion. ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... during those hours of oblivion? He seemed to have slept, and to have had terrible dreams. Could he have remembered these dreams, it seemed to him that the whole mystery of his removal to this desolate spot would be explained. And he knew that it required but ...
— Cudjo's Cave • J. T. Trowbridge
... it will be seen, shared the fate of Portocarrero, of Medina-Coeli, and of all those whose power she had broken or whose designs she had frustrated; and who, after their decease, were immediately buried in silence and oblivion. Divided into two parts by the death of Marie-Louise of Savoy, her political life in Spain had not always assumed the same character, a like aspect. The first had been marked by useful or glorious actions, and was of real grandeur; the second was more remarkable for ...
— Political Women, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Sutherland Menzies
... was over, she sought the refuge of a convent. But she quitted it without professing. The past gave her no peace, and she returned to the world to seek in excesses an oblivion which the cloister denied her and only death could give. In her will she disposed that her skull should be placed over the doorway of the house in the Calle de Ataud, as a measure of posthumous atonement for her sins. And there the fleshless, ...
— The Historical Nights Entertainment, Second Series • Rafael Sabatini
... older than Nature and her Time By all the timeless age of Consciousness, And my adult oblivion of the clime Where I was born makes me not countryless. Ay, and dim through my daylight thoughts escape Yearnings for that land where my childhood dreamed, Which I cannot recall in colour or shape But haunts my hours like something that hath gleamed And yet ...
— 35 Sonnets • Fernando Pessoa
... a conspicuous life as Elector and King; but no public feat he did now concerns us like this private one of Schwiebus. Historically important, this, and requiring to be remembered, while so much else demands mere oblivion from us. He was a spirited man; did soldierings, fine Siege of Bonn (July-October, 1689), sieges and campaignings, in person,—valiant in action, royal especially in patience there,—during that Third War of Louis-Fourteenth's, the Treaty-of-Ryswick one. All through the Fourth, or Spanish ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. III. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Hohenzollerns In Brandenburg—1412-1718 • Thomas Carlyle
... says the Greek proverb, who never forgets. The follies of the last debauch should be buried in eternal oblivion, in order to give full scope to the follies ...
— An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals • David Hume
... than once thereafter; he gravely proposed the impossible. He demanded conditions which would have made the duel a burlesque—a butcher's match with cavalry broadswords. But Shields, who was flawlessly literal, insisted. The two met and only on the dueling ground was the quarrel at last talked into oblivion by the seconds. Whether this was the cause of the reconciliation with Miss Todd, or a consequence, or had nothing to do with it, remains for the lovers of the unimportant to decide. The only sure fact in this connection is the marriage which ...
— Lincoln • Nathaniel Wright Stephenson
... this affair of his cousin's murder could be hushed up it would be hushed up—the Simon Crood gang, he was persuaded, would move heaven and earth to smooth things over and consign the entire episode to oblivion. Against that process he meant to labour: in his opinion the stirring up of strong public interest was the line to take, and he was fully determined that if the Coroner and his twelve good men and true could not sift the problem of this ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... our route led eastward through the villages which in September, 1914, woke from at least a century of oblivion, from the forgetting that followed Napoleon's last campaign in France to a splendid but terrible ten days: Courtacon, Sezanne, La-Fere Champenoise, Vitry-le-Francois, the region where Franchet d'Esperey and Foch fought, where the "Miracle of the Marne" was performed. Mile after ...
— They Shall Not Pass • Frank H. Simonds
... cannot be refuted, or, that the party in favour of it are too numerous to be opposed. WHEREFORE, instead of gazing at each other with suspicious or doubtful curiosity; let each of us, hold out to his neighbour the hearty hand of friendship, and unite in drawing a line, which, like an act of oblivion shall bury in forgetfulness every former dissension. Let the names of Whig and Tory be extinct; and let none other be heard among us, than those of A GOOD CITIZEN, AN OPEN AND RESOLUTE FRIEND, AND ...
— Common Sense • Thomas Paine
... time she had real oblivion from the memory of her deceit of Westerling, the oblivion of drear, heart-pulling suspense. All the good times, the sweetly companionable times, she and Lanny had had together; all his flashes of courtship, his outburst in their last interview in the arbor, when she had told ...
— The Last Shot • Frederick Palmer
... brave Sir Alexander Scrymgeour, whom I met in West Lothian, has not only brought fifty stout Scots to my command, but, as hereditary standard-bearer of the kingdom, has come himself to carry the royal banner of Scotland to glory or oblivion." ...
— The Scottish Chiefs • Miss Jane Porter
... stout "Rambler" shook out her snowy sails and flitted away to Bermuda, there was nothing left to ruffle the still waters of oblivion which had closed over Randall Clayton. Only upon the face of Robert Wade, Esq., lingered now an anxious ...
— The Midnight Passenger • Richard Henry Savage
... astonished ear to their tales of hardship and adventures. It is one object of our task, however, to present scenes of the rough life of the wilderness, and we are tempted to fix these few memorials of a transient state of things fast passing into oblivion; for the feudal state of Fort William is at an end, its council chamber is silent and deserted; its banquet hall no longer echoes to the burst of loyalty, or the "auld world" ditty; the lords of the lakes and forests have passed away; and the ...
— Astoria - Or, Anecdotes Of An Enterprise Beyond The Rocky Mountains • Washington Irving
... with wild and compelling sweep, has remained so deep in oblivion, appears immediately on a glance at the original. The author, Charles Robert Maturin, a needy, eccentric Irish clergyman of 1780-1824, could cause intense suspense and horror—could read keenly into human ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.
... old divinities forlorn, That dwelt in trees, or haunted in a stream? Alas! their memories are dimm'd and torn, Like the remainder tatters of a dream: So will it fare with our poor thrones, I deem;— For us the same dark trench Oblivion delves, That holds the wastes of every human scheme. O spare us then,—and these our pretty elves,— We soon, alas! shall perish ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... the "Storm and Stress" movement in Germany, that boisterous forerunner of Romanticism, yet so unlike it that even Schlegel compared its most typical representatives to the biblical herd of swine which stampeded—into oblivion. Herder, proclaiming the vital connection between the soul of a whole nation and its literature, and preaching a religion of the feelings rather than a gospel of "enlightenment;" young Goethe, by his daring and untrammeled ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IV • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... regarding the son's reception represents the complete reconciliation of the Gospel—the total oblivion of the prodigal's past sins, and his admission into the favour and the family of God, as a dear child. Even the details at this point have been framed after the pattern of spiritual privileges as they are elsewhere represented in the Scriptures; ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... spent, how Mr. Wyse announced the news, and how the Faradiddleony played bridge. (She said that satirical word aloud, mouthing it to the puddles and the dripping hedge-rows.) She would not evince the slightest interest in it all; she would cover it with spadefuls of oblivion, and when next she met Mr. Wyse she would, whatever she might feel, behave exactly as usual. She plumed herself on this dignified resolution, and walked so fast that the hedge-rows became quite transparent. That was the proper thing to do; she had been grossly slighted, and, ...
— Miss Mapp • Edward Frederic Benson
... excitement.' Moreover, he had an unlucky belief that he was a poet. From 1814 till 1819 he brought out yearly what he supposed to be a poem. These productions, the Paradise of Coquets and the rest, are in the old-fashioned taste, and have long passed into oblivion. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... wandering eye hurt Mary's pride. She was not really interested in her, and once Mary had come to that conclusion about any one, complete, utter oblivion enveloped them. She perceived, however, Barbara's agitation, and at that, flattered and appeased, she was amiable again. There followed between the two a ...
— The Golden Scarecrow • Hugh Walpole
... am informed that on that occasion you lost three of your powerful warriors. I do with this belt cover their dead bodies that they may not offend our sight any more and bury the whole affair in oblivion. ...
— Wampum - A Paper Presented to the Numismatic and Antiquarian Society - of Philadelphia • Ashbel Woodward
... they would fight to the glory of their country and their own honour. But if they swagger out to whip a decrepit and wheezy old man, when the excitement is over they will wish that the whole episode could be buried in oblivion. And I would be willing to wager anything you like that if this war does come off, so false is its sentiment that it will not inspire one great patriotic poem, nor even one of merit, and that the only thing you will accomplish will be to drag Cuba from the relaxing ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... disappearance had caused; the enormous rewards her uncle had offered in an effort to trace her; the thousand and one speculations as to what had become of her; and that then, gradually, as even the most startling and mystifying of events and happenings always do, the affair had dropped into oblivion and had been forgotten by the public at least. He began to count back. Yes, it must have been nearly five years ago; two years before she, as the Tocsin, and he, as the Gray Seal, had formed their amazing and singular partnership, ...
— The Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard
... history of this year, is not remarkable for any great events; but the most material of these happened in the brigade of Marion. As they are not altogether of a pleasant nature, it appears to have been the wish of many to bury them in oblivion, and therefore some of them have been suppressed, and others but slightly recorded. But, the correspondence gives dates and hints, which bring the whole to recollection; and it is the duty of the biographer to be impartial. It was hoped that he might have avoided ...
— A Sketch of the Life of Brig. Gen. Francis Marion • William Dobein James
... an excess of colouring steals over the canvas, which ultimately offends no eye so much as our own." But what if this love of effect in the critic has been too often obtained at the entire cost of the literary characters, the fruits of whose studious days at this moment lie withering in oblivion, or whose genius the critic has deterred from pursuing the career it had opened for itself! To have silenced the learned, and to have terrified the modest, is the barbarous triumph of a Hun or a Vandal; and the vaunted freedom of the literary republic departed from us when the vacillating ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... early morning, when the bell rang out at 5 o'clock, the hours of the day were mapped out for different kinds of work. The girls' schools were well cared for by Mrs. Williams—a lady whose literary gift has rescued from oblivion much of the life of those far-off days. A part of each day was devoted by the missionaries to their own acquisition of the Maori language, and to the translation of the Bible and Prayer Book. At this work William Williams excelled. He was an Oxford graduate, who joined his ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... day passed, they knew not. Nature is kind. When agony grows too keen, the All-mother veils the tortured body with oblivion. ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England
... of them have been handed down from father to son, unchanged, from the prehistoric past to the present day; a past contemporary, perhaps, with the mastodon, but certainly far back in the mists of antiquity. The importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain enough, and therefore the untimely death of Miss Johnson, who was evidently turning with congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to be regretted. For as Mr. Bernard McEnvoy well says in his preface to her "Vancouver Legends," she "has linked the vivid present with the immemorial ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... were as unattractive as their appearance and manners. These soubriquets spoke not of pious parents who had given their children to God, with a Christian name which they trusted would be registered in heaven. They told rather of lawless lives, and a past which must be buried in oblivion or acknowledged with shame and perhaps fear. "Fighting-cock," "Torpedo," "Brimstone," and "the Slasher," were among the leaders who dubbed Blair with the title of "Mum," and so saluted him on all occasions. ...
— The Boy Patriot • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... your account; also all that I did for your sainted mother before she died at Voa, to become one of the most important of those who surround the Queen of Heaven, and who, when they wish for any favour, have only to say half a word to get it. And do not cast in oblivion that at the last I obeyed your wish and brought you safely to Riolama. It is true that in some small things I deceived you; but that must not weigh with you, because it is a small matter and not worthy ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... fathers, including the Primate, had known what it was, when they defied their Sovereign, to be the idols of the mob; but when they adhered to his fallen cause they were deprived of their sees, and sent packing from their palaces without a single growl of popular discontent. Oblivion was their portion, even as it was of their Roman Catholic predecessors at the time ...
— In the Name of the Bodleian and Other Essays • Augustine Birrell
... condemns the practice but a cold, heartless, uncivilized people that know nothing of the warm attachments of refined society? Here the dead was raised to his long-cherished hopes, and the lost was found. Here all doubt and danger were buried in the vortex of oblivion; sectional differences no longer disunited their opinions; like the freed bird from the cage, sportive claps its rustling wings, wheels about to heaven in a joyful strain, and raises its notes to the upper sky. Ambulinia insisted upon ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... confiding, rather drowsy, child. Or was it that the fierceness of those past moments had killed his power of feeling? An almost dreamy hour—with the sun going down, the lamps being lighted one by one—and a sort of sweet oblivion over everything! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... lete out of my mende, Bot if I thoghte upon that hende. Therof me schal no Slowthe lette, Til deth out of this world me fette, Althogh I hadde on such a Ring, As Moises thurgh his enchanting Som time in Ethiope made, Whan that he Tharbis weddid hade. 650 Which Ring bar of Oblivion The name, and that was be resoun That where it on a finger sat, Anon his love he so foryat, As thogh he hadde it nevere knowe: And so it fell that ilke throwe, Whan Tharbis hadde it on hire hond, No knowlechinge of him ...
— Confessio Amantis - Tales of the Seven Deadly Sins, 1330-1408 A.D. • John Gower
... Henry," he said calmly, and in a voice of much melancholy. "These are severe expressions for a brother to use—but you are right—I did seek oblivion of my wretchedness in that whirlpool, as the only means of destroying the worm that feeds incessantly upon my heart; but Providence has willed it otherwise— and, moreover, I had not taken the danger of my faithful servant into the account. Had Sambo not saved me, I must have perished, for ...
— The Canadian Brothers - or The Prophecy Fulfilled • John Richardson
... Va. Oblivion, Norwood, White Heron, Eleanor Gwynn, Princess, Jean Monteith, Madam ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly
... rushing through the streets, with death in their hands, they found Archimedes sitting in the public square, with a number of geometrical figures drawn before him in the sand, which he was studying in oblivion of the tumult of war around. As a Roman soldier rushed upon him sword in hand, he called out to the rude warrior not to spoil the circle. But the soldier cut him down. Another story says that this ...
— Historic Tales, Volume 11 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... he repeated to himself the words that Lord Henry had said to him on the first day they had met, "To cure the soul by means of the senses, and the senses by means of the soul." Yes, that was the secret. He had often tried it, and would try it again now. There were opium-dens, where one could buy oblivion, dens of horror where the memory of old sins could be destroyed by the madness of ...
— The Picture of Dorian Gray • Oscar Wilde
... they found that Miss Stokes came no more with the hay. As far as they were concerned, she had vanished into oblivion. And Joe felt more relieved even than he had felt when he heard the firing cease, after the news had come that the armistice ...
— England, My England • D.H. Lawrence
... Stephen adds that it is also the enemy of fiction. In a sense both sayings are true. Scott was not always accurate as to facts and sinned freely against chronology. But he rescued a wide realm from cold oblivion and gave it back to human consciousness and sympathy. It is treating the past more kindly to misrepresent it in some particulars, than to leave it a blank to the imagination. The eighteenth-century historians were incurious ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... were fastened by a similar contrivance to the deck. He closed his eyes, and leaned back; the throbbings seemed to beat on his brain like the angry surf, smiting harder and harder until nature at length came to his relief and oblivion ...
— A Man and His Money • Frederic Stewart Isham
... anticipating refusal, now sexual false steps are seldom heard of. Moreover, it is particularly interesting to observe the difference which public opinion makes between such offenders in the past and those of the present. Whilst the mantle of oblivion is thrown over the former, public opinion has no indulgence for the latter. 'The woman who sold herself in former times was an unfortunate; she who does it now is an abandoned woman,' say the people. The woman who in former times was a prostitute but is now blameless carries ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... consequently strictly prohibited the slightest innovation and placed a power hitherto unknown in the hands of the police, more particularly in those of its secret functionaries, who listened to every word and consigned the suspected to the oblivion of a dungeon. This mute terrorism found many a victim. This system was, on the death of Leopold II., A.D. 1792,[2] publicly abolished by his son and successor, Francis II., but was ere long again carried ...
— Germany from the Earliest Period Vol. 4 • Wolfgang Menzel, Trans. Mrs. George Horrocks
... valley—the dark forests waving from the hill—and that home, the resort and refuge of all the minstrelsy and love of Italy, brightened by the "Lampeggiar dell' angelico riso," that makes a paradise in the face we love. Often, seduced by such dreams to complete oblivion of his loss, the young wanderer started from the ideal bliss, to behold around him the solitary waste of way—or the moonlit tents of war—or, worse than all, the crowds and revels of a ...
— Rienzi • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not saved the child from death? Had he not fed and clothed and cared for him during five years? Had he not rescued him from oblivion, and made every effort to endow him with wealth and position and an honored name? And then, to think that in the very moment when these efforts were about to meet with just success, this boy had turned against him, and brought ruin and disgrace upon ...
— Burnham Breaker • Homer Greene
... corrected, and gave a solemn little nod of her head and sighed, and thus they ratified that audacious compact of oblivion. ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... happily presents itself. As it appears, a short note is sufficient to raise inquiry; and inquiry may lead to new fact, or advance critical equity. It may rescue a meritorious author from oblivion, and restore him to his true position on ...
— Notes & Queries 1849.12.15 • Various
... luxuriant. This was the case with our adventurer; instead of indulging the melancholy ideas which his loss inspired, he had recourse to the flattering delusions of hope, soothing himself with unsubstantial plans of future greatness, and endeavouring to cover what was past with the veil of oblivion. After some hesitation, he resolved to make Crabtree acquainted with his misfortune, that once for all he might pass the ordeal of his satire, without subjecting himself to a long series of sarcastic hints and doubtful allusions, ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... ebbed back for a moment; he again sank into oblivion; and presently revived to the consciousness that soft arms were supporting him—arms that quivered and shook with the violent sobbing that fell upon his ears—while a shower of hot tears bathed his face. And then, all in an instant, recollection, vivid, intense, complete, ...
— Dick Leslie's Luck - A Story of Shipwreck and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... whilst awake; in this case we are right in saying that the dream carries on the chief interest of our waking life. More usually, however, when the dream contains anything relating to the impressions of the day, it is so trivial, unimportant, and so deserving of oblivion, that we can only recall it with an effort. The dream content appears, then, even when coherent and intelligible, to be concerned with those indifferent trifles of thought undeserving of our waking interest. The depreciation of dreams is largely due to the predominance ...
— Dream Psychology - Psychoanalysis for Beginners • Sigmund Freud
... he told Madame Novikoff that his task was done so far as Inkerman was concerned, and was proud to think that he had rescued from oblivion the heroism of the Russian troops in what he calls the "Third Period" of the great fight, ignored as it was by all Russian historians of the war. He made fruitless inquiries after a paper said to have been left behind him by Skobeleff, explaining that "India is a cherry ...
— Biographical Study of A. W. Kinglake • Rev. W. Tuckwell
... unworthy, serve out a double allowance of grog. In this way they hope to do it,—by steering on the old wrong tack, and serving out more and more, copiously what little aqua vitae may be still on board! Philanthropy, emancipation, and pity for human calamity is very beautiful; but the deep oblivion of the Law of Right and Wrong; this "indiscriminate mashing up of Right and Wrong into a patent treacle" of the Philanthropic movement, is by no means beautiful; this, on the contrary, ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... the starched band of a confining cap. Outside the stinging whistle of the insect world was interrupted now and then by the cough of a passing motor. From the doors opening on the corridor an occasional restless moan indicated the inability of some sufferer to take his dose of oblivion according to schedule. Presently a bell tinkled a summons to the patient in the first room on the right—a gentle little old lady who had ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... could have recriminated upon me with a vengeance. But I was willing to see if she were not loth to disoblige me now. I comforted myself, I said, with the hopes that all my difficulties were now over; and that every past disobligations would be buried in oblivion. ...
— Clarissa, Volume 4 (of 9) - History Of A Young Lady • Samuel Richardson
... than such remedies as Mrs. Vosburgh's matronly experience knew how to apply. Few remain long on mountain-tops, physical or metaphorical, and deep valleys lie all around them. Little else could be done for the poor girl than to bring the oblivion of sleep, and let kindly Nature nurse her child back to a more healthful ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... girl with a more cruel impact than it had struck the brain of this lieutenant of France. She, too, crumpled and fell upon the thorns. His had been a speedy, painless death; one sharp electric stroke and then the closing night. A like oblivion would have been sweet to her. But she had to face it out alone. Upon her torn heart were beaten a thousand hammer-strokes, and through the endless nights she bore the anguish of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... certain indication in matters of thought, that they were not destined to durable fame. They fell in with the ideas and passions of the time; they were not before it; thence their early popularity and ultimate oblivion. The work was published anonymously; for the keen but delicate satire on French manners and vices which it contained, might have endangered the author, and as it was he had no small difficulty, when it was known he ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various
... from the shore, and, laden with its great cargo of unwanted things, carries it through Bering Straits to haunt the Arctic Ocean, perhaps for years to come. It is moved hither and yon until time and tide and many storms have at last ground it into oblivion. ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... concerned in the British, and London Journals, and a paper called The Speculatist. These periodical pieces are long since buried in neglect, and perhaps would have even sunk into oblivion, had not Mr. Pope, by his satyrical writings, given them a kind of disgraceful immortality. In these Journals he published many scurrilities against Mr. Pope; and in a pamphlet called, The Supplement to the Profound, he used him with great virulence, and little candour. He not only imputed ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... Terrors swallowing human flesh and blood, and a thousand petty deaths, from every hole, feeding him with fresh, warm flesh. "Behold," said the death who brought me there, addressing himself to the king, "a spark, whom I found in the midst of the land of Oblivion; he came so light footed, that your majesty never tasted a morsel of him." "How can that be?" said the king, and opened his jaws as wide as an earthquake to swallow me. Whereupon I turned all trembling to Sleep. "It was I," said Sleep, "who brought him here." "Well," said the meagre, grizly ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne
... it. [3570]Si longa est, levis est; si gravis est, brevis est. If it be long, 'tis light; if grievous, it cannot last. It will away, dies dolorem minuit, and if nought else, time will wear it out; custom will ease it; [3571] oblivion is a common medicine for all losses, injuries, griefs, and detriments whatsoever, [3572]"and when they are once past, this commodity comes of infelicity, it makes the rest of our life sweeter unto us:" [3573] ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior |
