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Excerpt from In Memoriam, Brevet Colonel U. S. And N. Y. Vol; John Watts De Peyster, Junior, Died 12th April, 1873
The waters of Lethe are deadly cold, fit emblems of the pagan spirit that dictated the fable. Is there a way to forget to think? Asks the poet, in a dreary apostrophe of woe. The question' answers itself. While the brain holds thought, it must hold memory also, and the loss of memory is the loss of reason. To us, who live in the brightness of that light to which all the wisdom of the ancients only shows as a feeble glimmer in the darkness of ignorance, there is a sweeter-spring than ever lay, still and dark, in the pool of Lethe.
The pleasures of hope are ours, alike for ourselves in the shadow of death, and in the memory of those who have gone before us on the long journey, from which none return, but which all must take. That hope it was which dried the tears of the warrior monarch of Israel, when he reproved his servants with the simple words, f'i shall go to him, but he Shall not come to me.
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