Does anybody know where the phrase "lost to the ages" originates?

Question

I think there's something fairly poetic about the origins of the phrase "lost to the ages" actually being lost to the ages, still I'd like to know where it hails from if anyone knows.

Thanks

Hugo · Accepted Answer

The earliest I found in the Australian Trove newspaper archive for lost to the age (singular) is Freeman's Journal of 21 June 1862:

Thus like Pyrho the
  doubting philosopher, their powers remain
  in suspense, gradually they sink into the
  quiet of a country or domestic life and are
  lost to the age.

In the plural is Albury Banner and Wodonga Express of 12 July 1918:

What tales she told ! Of suffering almost
  intolerable borne with incredible patience;
  of death despised, and scorned ; of courage
  indomitable in the merest stripling school-
  boys ; of the spirit of youth and daring
  and splendid enthusiasm shown by men
  with greying hairs ; of heroism of all ranks
  never surpassed in the world's history---
  heroism whose recital must be lost to the
  ages to come because of its universality.

Sven Yargs · Answer

The earliest instance of "lost to the ages" that a Google Books search finds is from an address delivered by Marcus Garvey at the opening of a UNIA convention in August 1921, reprinted in The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers (1984):

You have been honored here to represent the true interests of Negroes everywhere; they expect you to match your intelligence, your intellect with that of David Lloyd George and Clemenceau. Clemenceau sees down the ages; Lloyd George sees down the ages and you will have also to see down the ages, otherwise you are lost to the ages.

The next-oldest is in Frances Winwar, Farewell the Banner: "...Three Persons and One Soul...": Coleridge, Wordsworth and Dorothy (1938):

Even at Christ's Hospital the clamour from France was heard and found its echo. But in the golden book of the Rev. Mr. Boyer no unhallowed libertarian word was allowed to enter. Hence, of the six stanzas bristling with personification and clamant for zeal in the cause of freedom over which Coleridge burned his midnight lamp, not a verse, not a sentiment elaborated with all the arts of prosody, reached his generation. Worse, two stanzas describing the Bastille and its prisoners were completely lost to the ages.

And the next definite example that Google Books finds is in a poem in Kojo Ginaye Kyei, Ghana—the Road Tomorrow (1978):

Monkeys, parrots, hawks . . ./Will then come to mourn the passing/Of yet another favourite/rest spot/Lost to the ages,/Lost to the ages . . ./The fields in time go dry/bone dry/And Sahara on cat's feet/drops in to take over/The whole of/Our flora and fauna possessions/With an agbadza of delight!

Meanwhile, a somewhat related phrase—"lost in the mists of antiquity"—goes back at least to 1805, in a translation by Arthur Murphy of Tacitus's A treatise on the situation, manners, and people of Germany. Murphy has recourse to the phrase twice:

Whether the first inhabitants of Britain were natives of the island, or adventitious settlers, is a question lost in the mists of antiquity. The Britons, like other barbarous nations, have no monuments of their history.

and

The Eudosians, the Nuithones and Suardonians are almost lost in the mists of antiquity. The Angles are better known.

Nigel Rees, Cassell Dictionary of Cliches (1996) offers this entry for yet another similar term:

lost in the mists of time. General idiomatic use. Date of origin unknown (or, rather, lost in the . . .). A cliché by the 1950s/60s.

Does anybody know where the phrase "lost to the ages" originates?

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