Lost

“ You struggle so, or, like a wounded wolf, which, in the depths of its cave, awaits his recovery only in time, wrapped in your solitary suffering, you can, near or far, assign a term to your grief, and hope, at least, in forgetfulness. Forgetfulness,—this only inexorable reality of life! Forgetfulness,—this fathomless ocean, wherein come unceasingly to be lost all sorrow, all love, and all curses. ”

“ In that eternal time,
In which my lost hopes find a home,
My spirit knows its clime.
Oh! not myself,— for what am I?—
The worthless and the weak,
Whose every thought of self should raise
A blush to burn my cheek. ”

“ Which like as footboys on her actions wait,
That fortune's scale should to my sorrow turn,
And I one day the rash neglect should mourn;
That good to bad should change, and I should be
Lost to this world and all eternity ”

“ But now to-day she had suddenly come on some of the footprints of the Man of Sorrow as He toiled over the mountains of earth searching for lost humanity, and her own heart echoed His love and sorrow for the world. ”

“ Or we count them lost by the crueler death
Of a trust betrayed, or a murdered faith.
Slipping away are the hopes that made
Bliss out of sorrow, and sun out of shade.
Slipping away is our hold on life. ”

“ Here the lost are so crowded together that they have no room to move. This is the deepest and widest hell of all, and here the throng of sufferers must endure their torments until that day when a great cloud shall appear in the heavens, announcing the end of the world. ”

“ for who would lose, Though full of pain, this intellectual being, Those thoughts that wander through eternity, To perish rather, swallowed up and lost In the wide womb of uncreated Night, Devoid of sense and motion? ”

“ Lost, sometimes, like a star which the clouds have blotted out, it always reappeared, and shone at last with almost the light of an inspiration, a proof of the strong and steady influence which the dead can wield. ”

“ Or was it only that the lost thing, whatever it was, made that faint appeal to him, passing the door by chance, and drew him in, as the scent of some herb or flower in a moment draws us back years to look for something lost in our youth; we gaze back, wondering, and do not find it. ”

“ So we shuddered there in silence,—
⁠For the stoutest held his breath,
While the hungry sea was roaring,
⁠And the breakers talked with Death.
As thus we sat in darkness,
⁠Each one busy in his prayers,—
"We are lost!" ”

“ Then downward fell, forever lost to sight.
And so it is, I thought, that poor hearts yearning
For more of life, charmed by its outward sheen,
Must backward fall, the truth too quickly learning,
That death, cold and unyielding, stands between. ”

“ What though the field be lost? All is not lost—the unconquerable will, And study of revenge, immortal hate, And courage never to submit or yield: And what is else not to be overcome? ”

“ Where I have lost, I softer tread —
I sow sweet flower from garden bed —
I pause above that vanished head
And mourn.
Whom I have lost, I pious guard
From accent harsh, or ruthless word —
Feeling as if their pillow heard,
Though stone! ”

“ Their earlier selves we glimpse at intervals Far in the dimming past; We see the little forms as once they were, And whilst we ache to take them to our hearts, The vision fades. We know them lost to us—Forever lost; we cannot have them back; We miss them as we miss the dead, We mourn them as we mourn the dead. ”

“ Forget the dead, the past? Oh, yet
There are ghosts that may take revenge for it,
Memories that make the heart a tomb,
Regrets which glide through the spirit's gloom,
And with ghastly whispers tell
That joy, once lost, is pain. ”

“ Pour views of its own hideous state revolve around the lost soul, like the pictures of some ghastly show. One while it sees the million times ten million genera and species of pains of sense which meet and form a loathsome union with this vast central pain of loss. ”

“ Whatever can to sight or thought be formed,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost! how on a sudden lost,
Defaced, deflowered, and now to death devote!
Rather, how hast thou yielded to transgress
The strict forbiddance, how to violate
The sacred fruit forbidden! Some cursed fraud
Of enemy hath beguiled thee, yet unknown,
And me with thee hath ruined; for with thee
Certain my resolution is to die:
How can I live without thee! how forego
Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,
To live again in these wild woods forlorn! ”

“ I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.
You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light. ”

“ You may look back with your eyes
Turned to the dead of the Past,
And find with a sad surprise,
That yours is the dead at the last.
Seeing afar in the sands,
Gardens grown green, at what cost!
You may reach upward your hands,
Praying for what you have lost. ”

“ Old memories throng upon the heart—memories of early, happy days, and of the loved and lost. The lost—ah, too soon did some die in their young beauty, whilst others dropped, like ripe fruit, into the tomb. ”

“ There is no connected story of events, thoughts, acts, or feelings. We try in vain to re-collect; but the secrets of the grave are not more inviolable,—for the beginnings, like the endings, of life are lost in darkness. ”

“ Pomp and glories, beauty and desire, wealth and want, things lost and things achieved, all we seek and all we gain, our joys and griefs, yes, birth and death themselves, are but bubbles on the stream of being which appear and disappear. ”

“ Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost—something's left behind. ”

“ Lost men were like lost needles in that wilderness. He, tattered and scratched and unkempt and aching after his mad scamperings in his lost man's panic, had he ever been well-garbed and calm and eloquent in a pulpit? ”

“ I've lost everything in this world, and it's clean gone, forever,—and now I can't lose Heaven, too; no, I can't get to be wicked, besides all!" ”

“ These fleeting utterances, alas ! are lost, like the leaves swept of old from the sibyl's cave. But as souls are, after all, the most permanent facts that we know of, who shall say that one breath of them is wasted. ”

“ How quietly others stole away in their youth to the home of the dead, and how the rest have drifted away on the currents of life and are lost to me in the mists and shadows of time. Even the home and the hearth are gone ”

“ Suspended Hell, and took with ravishment The thronging audience. In discourse more sweet (For Eloquence the Soul, Song charms the Sense) Others apart sat on a hill retired, In thoughts more elevate, and reasoned high Of Providence, Foreknowledge, Will, and Fate— Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute, And found no end, in wandering mazes lost. ”

“ Witness the fact that he met first one, and afterwards several shadows of men, men like himself, it seemed, who had lost their bodies even it may be as he had lost his, and wandered, despairingly, in that lost world that is neither life nor death. ”

“ Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
⁠Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse. ”

“ They all give up themselves for lost and gone; they say, " Our bones are dried, our strength is exhausted, our spirits are gone, our hope is all lost; every thing we looked for succour and relief from fails us, and we are cut off for our parts. ”

“ even in the grave all is not lost. ”

“ It was one of those dewy, clear, starry nights, oppressing our spirit, crushing our pride, by the brilliant evidence of the awful loneliness, of the hopeless obscure insignificance of our globe lost in the splendid revelation of a glittering, soulless universe. ”

“ I should never have imagined that the sight of any human being could affect me as had this unexpected discovery of Victory in the same room in which I was, while I had thought of her for weeks either as dead, or at best hundreds of miles to the west, and as irretrievably lost to me as though she were, in truth, dead. ”

“ yet what I am none cares or knows,
My friends forsake me like a memory lost;
I am the self-consumer of my woes,
They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shades in love and death's oblivion lost;
And yet I am, and live with shadows tost
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, ”

“ Lost in the beauty where he was lost, we find more than we ever threw away, we reach what seems to be our spiritual home, and remember that it was not the speaker who was in the beginning but the Word. ”

“ I wish we were dead together to-day,
Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight,
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,
Out of the world's way, out of the light,
Out of the ages of worldly weather,
Forgotten of all men altogether,
As the world's first dead, taken wholly away,
Made one with death, filled full of the night. ”

“ The quiet sense of something lost.
In Memoriam, LXXVIII. A. TENNYSON.
Praising what is lost
Makes the remembrance dear.
All's Well that Ends Well, Act v. Sc. 3. SHAKESPEARE.
Though lost to sight, to memory dear
Thou ever wilt remain;
One only hope my heart can cheer,
The hope to meet again.
Song: Though Lost to Sight. G. LINLEY.
You take my house when you do take the prop
That doth sustain my house; you take my life
When you do take the means whereby I live.
Merchant of Venice, Act iv. Sc. 1. SHAKESPEARE.
The loss of wealth is loss of dirt,
As sages in all times assert ”

“ Abject and lost, lay these, covering the flood,
Under amazement of their hideous change.
He called so loud that all the hollow deep
Of Hell resounded: "Princes, Potentates,
Warriors, the flower of Heaven, once yours, now lost,
If such astonishment as this can seize
Eternal Spirits. ”

“ They cling their whole life long painfully to the irrevocable past, to the dream of a lost paradise, the worst and most deadly of all dreams. ”

“ If these first words do not fill you with an uneasy presentiment of doom, indeed, indeed you have been hitherto blessed in an ignorance of woe.
It is lost! What is lost? The revelation this page was to afford. ”

“ from those great eyes The soul has fled When faith is lost, when honor dies, The man is dead! ”

“ Troubled their hearts with the ceaseless surge and the thunder—
Till in fear they turned, and they gazed on the inland hight,
And the mountains that called by day and beckoned by night,
And, each to the other unknown, by that call was shaken:
O, lost is the soul that the voice of the hight shall not waken,
Nor heavenward climb by the paths high hearts have taken.
II
Inland the new souls urged, by river and marsh,
Treading with stedfast feet the roadways harsh. ”