A PSALM OF LIFE
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labour and to wait.
It
was early morning. The bright sun streamed through the windows of the Craigie
house on Cambridge where George Washington has once had his headquarters, and
where a young Harvard Professor now lived. He lived, in fact, in the very room
that Washington had occupied. And as the stood gazing out of the window at the
sloping lawn and the elms, he wondered if Washington might not have stood here
once feeling perhaps as he did- unutterably lonely and dejected.
The
young man’s wife had died three years ago, but he longed for her still. Time
has not softened his grief or eased the torment of his memories. He turned
restlessly from the window and wondered how to spend the time before breakfast.
He
was a poet too; this young professor; but he had no heart for poetry these
days. He had no heart for anything. It seemed, Life had become an empty dream.
But
this could not go on, he told himself! He was letting the days slip by, nursing
his despondency. Life was not an empty dream! He must be up and doing. Let the
dead past bury its dead….
Suddenly
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was writing in a surge of inspiration,
the lines coming almost too quickly for his racing pen :
A PSALM OF LIFE
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.
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,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each tomorrow
Find us farther than today.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
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!
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!
Lives of great men all reminds us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
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,
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
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