Tell me not in mournful numbers

Tell me not in mournful numbers. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow* (1807-1882). First published in Longfellow’s Voices of the Night (1839) with the title ‘A Psalm of Life: What the heart of the Young Man said to the Psalmist.’ The hymn should be understood as a youthful and energetic response to what is here perceived as the elderly melancholy of certain psalms, probably the ‘penitential psalms’. The mournful numbers are here given a bracing corrective, summed up in the final verse, beginning ‘Let us then be up and doing’. The Unitarian imperative to work for a better world, and the aspiration towards a nobility of thought and action, is found in the celebrated verse 5: Lives of great souls all...