Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy righteousness in the land of forgetfulness? The land of forgetfulness? - The place of separate spirits, or the invisible world. The heathens had some notion of this state. They feigned a river in the invisible world, called Lethe, Ληθη, which signifies oblivion, and that those who drank of it remembered no more any thing relative to their former state.
- Animae, quibus altera fato
Corpora debentur, lethaei ad fluminis undam
Securos latices et longa oblivia potant.
Virg. Aen. 6: 713.
To all those souls who round the river wait
New mortal bodies are decreed by fate;
To yon dark stream the gliding ghosts repair,
And quaff deep draughts of long oblivion there.