More from and about
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
(biographical info at bottom of page)

  

Every heart an has its secret sorrows which the world knows not;
and often times we call a person cold when he or she is only sad.

   

An enlightened mind is not hoodwinked; it is not shut up in a gloomy prison till it thinks the walls of its dungeon the limits of the universe, and the reach of its own chain the outer verge of intelligence.
  
  
Be still, sad heart! and cease repining;
Behind the clouds is the sun still shining;
Thy fate is the common fate of all,
Into each life some rain must fall.

      
There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion that if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, spilled on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.
  
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.
   

The heights by great men reached and kept
were not attained in sudden flight
but, they while their companions slept,
they were toiling upwards in the night.

     

If we could read the secret history of our enemies, we should find in
each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.

   

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Most people would succeed in small things if
they were not troubled with great ambitions.

   

It takes less time to do a thing right than to explain why you did it wrong.

   

Give what you have. To someone, it may be better than you dare to think.

   

    
No American poet ever filled out the part quite like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  One glance at the Moses-like profile on the jacket of the new Library of America edition of his selected poems and prose confirms as much, a silver-hued photograph taken late in his life that makes it appear as if the domed brow and furling beard were already sculpted in marble.  The stately cadence of his name alone reverberates with gravitas: trochee, trochee, dactyl, a name that all but demands to be chiseled on the base of a bust or high on the portico of a classical-revival library.  And so it has been, time and again, even as his once-monumental repute has gradually eroded since his death in 1882.

Was he a great poet?  He was certainly a grand poet, and in the public mind the grandest of his day and age.  No American poet of any era, it's safe to say, has been both as awesomely prolific and prodigiously popular.  If Walt Whitman, his younger contemporary by a dozen years, is enshrined as the founding father of modern American poetry, Longfellow deserves no less than to be remembered as the native bard who gave mythic dimension to the country's historical imagination, a national poet of epic sweep and solemn feeling who came along right at the moment when the emerging nation had the most need for one.  The forest primeval, the village smithy under the spreading chestnut tree, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, the Indian princeling Hiawatha in his birch canoe -- such were the iconic images Longfellow forged out of the American collective consciousness in volume after lionized volume.  The enduring artistry of his ceremonious and at times overly starchy verse can be debated, but not the potency of its ennobling sentiments or the resounding strains it struck from what Lincoln famously invoked as "the mystic chords of memory."

Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine, in 1807, and educated at Bowdoin College, where one of his classmates was Nathaniel Hawthorne. A gifted linguist, he was appointed to a chair at Harvard as a professor of modern languages before he was thirty.  By 1857, when The Atlantic Monthly was founded under the editorship of James Russell Lowell, Longfellow was in the prime of his writing life and incontestably the most celebrated poet in the land.  His verse narrative "The Song of Hiawatha" (1855) had sold 50,000 copies; its successor, "The Courtship of Miles Standish," racked up 10,000 purchases on its first day in London when it appeared in 1858.  This popular success, combined with a nearly unstinting critical acclaim (one notable dissenting voice belonged to Edgar Allan Poe, who years earlier had savaged Longfellow's Ballads and Other Poems in a review, fuming that its author's "conception of the aim of poetry is all wrong") won for Longfellow an audience and eminence in the nineteenth century that even such beloved American poets as Frost and Sandburg were not to rival in later generations.
  

    

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Other people:  Alan Watts - Albert Einstein - Albert Schweitzer - Andy Rooney - Anne Frank - Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Anne Wilson Schaef
- Annie Dillard - Anthony Robbins - Ari Kiev - Artur Rubenstein - Barbara Johnson - Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Franklin
- Benjamin Hoff - Bernie Siegel - Bertrand Russell - Betty Eadie - Booker T. Washington
Charlotte Davis Kasl
- Cheryl Richardson - Cristina Feldman - C.S. Lewis - the Dalai Lama - Dale Carnegie - Deepak Chopra
Don Miguel Ruiz
- Earl Nightingale - Elaine St. James - Eleanor Roosevelt - Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emmet Fox
- Frederick Buechner - George Bernard Shaw - George Santayana - George Washington Carver - Gerald Jampolsky
Harold Kushner
- Harry Emerson Fosdick - Helen Keller - Henry David Thoreau - Henry James - Henry Van Dyke
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- Henry Ward Beecher - Hugh Prather - Immanuel Kant - Iyanla Vanzant - Jack Canfield
James Allen
- Jennifer James - Jim Rohn - Joan Borysenko - Joan Chittister - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - John Izzo
John Ruskin
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Leo Buscaglia
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Marianne Williamson
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Mohandas Gandhi
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Norman Vincent Peale
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Rabindranath Tagore
- Rachel Carson - Rachel Naomi Remen - Rainer Maria Rilke - Ralph Waldo Trine - Richard Bach
Richard Carlson
- Robert Frost - Robert Fulghum - Robert Louis Stevenson - Russell Baker - Sarah Ban Breathnach
Shakti Gawain
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Sylvia Boorstein
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Wayne Dyer
- Wilferd A. Peterson - Willa Cather - William James - William Wordsworth - Zig Ziglar

   

       
    

Yes, life can be mysterious and confusing--but there's much of life that's actually rather dependable and reliable.  Some principles apply to life in so many different contexts that they can truly be called universal--and learning what they are and how to approach them and use them can teach us some of the most important lessons that we've ever learned.
My doctorate is in Teaching and Learning.  I use it a lot when I teach at school, but I also do my best to apply what I've learned to the life I'm living, and to observe how others live their lives.  What makes them happy or unhappy, stressed or peaceful, selfish or generous, compassionate or arrogant?  In this book, I've done my best to pass on to you what I've learned from people in my life, writers whose works I've read, and stories that I've heard.  Perhaps these principles can be a positive part of your life, too!
Universal Principles of Living Life Fully.  Awareness of these principles can explain a lot and take much of the frustration out of the lives we lead.