Hi friends !!!
once again its not my composition but i am posting it here coz i really find it worth sharing with all of you..............................

A Psalm of Life

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 are, to dust thou returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each tomorrow

Find us farther than today.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world"s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

Trust no Future, howe"er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,- act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o"erhead.

Lives of great men all remind us

we can make our lives sublime,

And,dparting,leave behind us

Footprints on the sand of time.

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o"er life"s solemn main,

a forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us then be up and doing,

with a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Note

"Mr. Longfellow said of this poem: `I kept it some time in manuscript, unwilling to show it to any one, it being a voice from my inmost heart, at a time when I was rallying from depression." Before it was published in the Knickerbocker Magazine, October, 1838, it was read by the poet to his college class at the close of a lecture on Goethe. Its title, though used now exclusively for this poem, was originally, in the poet"s mind, a generic one. He notes from time to time that he has written a psalm, a psalm of death, or another psalm of life. The `psalmist" is thus the poet himself. When
printed in the Knickerbocker it bore as a motto the lines from Crashaw:

Life that shall send

A challenge to its end,
And when it comes, say, Welcome, friend."