Lives of great men all remind us we can make…
Quote
Lives of great men all remind us we can make our lives sublime, and, departing, leave behind us footprints on the sands of time.
The story behind this quote
This is the seventh stanza of “A Psalm of Life”, subtitled “What the Heart of the Young Man Said to the Psalmist”. The poem answers the mournful view that life is “but an empty dream”: “Life is real! Life is earnest! / And the grave is not its goal.” Art is long and time is fleeting, so one must not be like “dumb, driven cattle” but “a hero in the strife”, and “Act,—act in the living Present!” Then come the great men and their footprints, which a “forlorn and shipwrecked brother” may one day see, and take heart again. The poem ends: “Learn to labor and to wait.”
Longfellow, a young professor at Harvard, first published the poem in a magazine in 1838, then in his first book of poems, Voices of the Night. It was enormously popular and learned by heart in schools, before later critics mocked its preaching tone. Its central image holds a quiet paradox: footprints on sand do not last, yet they can guide the next traveller.
The source
A Psalm of Life (Voices of the Night), stanza 7 (first printed in a magazine in 1838), 1839
Checked word for word in the work itself.
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Author
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The most popular American poet of the nineteenth century, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow taught modern languages at Harvard and wrote Evangeline, The Song of Hiawatha and ‘Paul Revere’s Ride’. His poems were memorised in schools on both sides of the Atlantic, and he was the first…
Quotes by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow