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.

These lines open Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Psalm of Life,” written early in his career and first published in the 1830s, when he was establishing himself as a leading American poet. Cast as a “psalm,” the poem adopts a sermonic, exhortatory tone, pushing back against fashionable melancholy and fatalism. Longfellow frames the speaker as responding to a “Psalmist” who calls life an “empty dream,” insisting instead on purposeful action, moral striving, and the soul’s endurance beyond bodily death. The poem’s popularity in the nineteenth century made these opening stanzas among Longfellow’s most widely quoted lines.

The passage rejects despairing romantic pessimism (“Life is but an empty dream!”) and argues for an active, morally serious view of human existence. “Life is real! Life is earnest!” asserts that life has weight and consequence, not merely illusion. Longfellow distinguishes the fate of the body from the destiny of the soul: the biblical “Dust thou art, to dust returnest” applies to physical mortality, but not to the soul’s meaning or value. The lines urge wakefulness—spiritual and ethical alertness—implying that to “slumber” is to be dead in the only sense that matters: disengaged from purpose, duty, and aspiration.