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Sail forth longfellow2/1/2024 ![]() Take action! Act now (he tells us three times), so that tomorrow finds us farther than today. We counter passivity by taking heart-filled action today.īe ourselves don’t just follow the dumb-driven herd. To be passively entertained is not our life purpose or goal. We each have a purpose to fill, and it doesn’t happen in the future, and it doesn’t happen in the past. Life is too brief don’t sleep-walk through it. Longfellow contemplates the testimony he’d received, a manifesto from the dead to the living. He remembers how, from lips of dust, the dead young man had urged him to act in the living present, to live up to the best that is in him, to live a noble life. Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.”Īs he reflects on these phrases engraved on the marble tablet, he remembers the young nobleman buried beneath it. He remembers the graveyard at Salzburg, and the words inscribed on the marble tablet on the chapel wall: “What do I need to do, at this moment-‘in the living present’-to live the life I was put on this planet to live?” Forging a Fight against DepressionĪs he is rallying from depression, he remembers Goethe’s doctrine that he’d studied during his work abroad-art is long, life is short, opportunity fleeting-and he asks himself the following question to rally from depression: Grief throws a long shadow, and the darkness of melancholy soon returns. The light of meaning and purpose had entered the darkness deep within him, and it brings hope to his grieving heart, but consolation is temporary. It was, writes Longfellow, as though “the stone was rolled away from the door of his heart death was no longer there, but an angel clothed in white.” He writes in his semi-autobiographical novel Hyperion, that it was as though the unknown tenant-this young man-had “opened his lips of dust and spoken words of consolation.” Go forth to meet the shadowy Future, without fear, and with a manly heart.Īs he reads these words, he learns that he’d been kneeling at the grave of a young nobleman who’d died twenty-five years earlier. ![]() He needed no lesson on the brevity of life, or that “from dust we are and to dust returneth.”Īfter a while on his knees, he raises his eyes, and through his tears, he looks on the tablet mounted on the chapel wall facing him, and he reads these words engraved on the marble: He needed no infant’s funeral to remind him of the death of his young wife and their unborn child. He watches as she stops at a hollow of freshly broken earth and places her little bundle into the ground. She holds in her arms the body of an infant wrapped in a sheet. He staggers up the hill toward the ringing bells, and as he approaches the churchyard, he can see a young girl leading a funeral procession. The chimes so vividly recall the sounds he’d heard when Mary had died that a wave of grief pounds him with brute force. “I am completely crushed to the earth,” he writes his confidante, “and I have no friend with me to cheer me and console me.” Burial of the Infantĭespite the heaviness of grief, he pushes forward to Salzburg where-weary and resting by a lake-he hears church bells. To make it worse, he is far from friends and far from home, which only intensifies his sorrow. Not a page can I read without my thoughts wandering from it.” She is dead-she is dead! All day I am weary and sad-and at night I cry myself to sleep like a child. He studies Goethe and other German authors, but grief makes concentration difficult, and his study and command of German suffers for it. Before closing the lid, he pulls the rings from her fingers and places them on his own. He jots her name and age on a piece of paper and places it in her coffin. He arranges for burial at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he schedules passage on a packet ship to carry Mary’s body across the ocean. The next day, in the numbness of early grief, Longfellow completes the sad tasks of the newly bereaved. Longfellow and his beautiful young wife Mary are far from home when she dies following complications from pregnancy. It happened to Longfellow, and the divine message he received not only transformed his own heartbreak, but inspired the grief transformation of readers across many decades, including my own.Īnd it just might transform your grief story, too! ![]() Have you ever received a message from someone who has died? A message so clear and so true that you knew-from that deep-beneath place within you-that it was a divine message coming through them to you?
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