From Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay *Self-Reliance* (1841). Select the word that fits the blank. "But the man is as it were clapped into jail by his consciousness. As soon as he has once acted or spoken with *éclat* he is a committed person, watched by the sympathy or the hatred of hundreds, whose affections must now enter into his account. There is no ______ for this. Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!"

Emerson's image is that the man, once publicly committed, can never return to anonymity — *"Ah, that he could pass again into his neutrality!"* The longing is for a way to **forget** and be forgotten. "Lethe" — in Greek mythology, the river of forgetfulness in the underworld, whose waters caused the dead to forget their earthly lives — is the exact metaphor. Emerson uses the allusion to mean *there is no oblivion available* to the public man. - "Solace," "defence," and "compensation" all name forms of relief or remedy, but none of them carries the specific sense of *forgetting* that the next sentence ("could pass again into his neutrality") demands. Classical allusions like *Lethe* are recurrent in nineteenth-century essayistic prose and are exactly the kind of vocabulary GRE Verbal targets.