Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) was born in Portland, Maine, and educated at Bowdoin College. He lived most of his life in Cambridge, Massachusetts, traveled extensively in Europe, and later taught at both Bowdoin and Harvard Colleges. A staunch abolitionist and vocal supporter of reconciliation between the Northern and Southern states following the Civil War, Longfellow was a central figure in New England social, intellectual, and political circles. He published his first volumes of poetry, Voices of the Night and Ballads and Other Poems, in 1839 and 1841, respectively. In 1868, with the help of his friends William Dean Howells, James Russell Lowell, and Charles Eliot Norton—a group known as “The Dante Club”—Longfellow published the first translation by an American of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was also a member of the Fireside Poets, a group of five American poets best known for their popular, populist works, meant to entertain families gathered around the household fire. During his lifetime, Longfellow enjoyed incomparable commercial success both at home and abroad: by 1874, he was earning as much as $3,000 per poem, and his work was translated into Italian, French, and German. His most popular works include the short poems included here as well as “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1860), “The Wreck of the Hesperus” (1841), and the epic poems The Song of Hiawatha (1855) and Evangeline (1847).

A Psalm of Life

First published in the Knickerbocker, “A Psalm of Life” was reprinted in his collection Voices of the Night in 1839.

What the heart of the young man said to the psalmist.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

“Life is but an empty dream!”

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

5

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

“Dust thou art, to dust returnest,”

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

10

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each to-morrow

Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

15

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

20

Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,—act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

25

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footsteps on the sands of time;

Footprints, that perhaps another,

30

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

35

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

(1838)