Photo of the Day

The people of 1938.

With words from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow written one hundred years before.

Rural Indiana, 1938.

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

West Virginia coal miners go home from work, 1938.

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

Mrs. M. LaBlanc washing dishes in her kitchen. Morganza, Louisiana, 1938.

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dad and his boys, Missouri, 1938.

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

London, Ohio, 1938.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

Barber/justice of the peace, West Virginia, 1938.

But to act, that each to-morrow,

Find us farther than to-day.

Harvesting wheat in Ohio, 1938.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting, 

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Local leader. California, 1938.

Still, like muffled drums,

are beating Funeral marches to the grave.

School for Black children in southeast Missouri, 1938.

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!

World-watchers, Ohio, 1938.

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!

Wife of an unemployed man suffering from tuberculosis at the abandoned building they live in, 1938.

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;

Itinerant farm worker in California, 1938.

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

Pea pickers in California, 1938.

Let us, then, be up and doing,  

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,  

Southeast Missouri, 1938.

Learn to labor and to wait.

******************************

I’ll see you tomorrow.

— Brenda

Longfellow’s poem is entitled, “A Psalm of Life.”