Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Longfellow builds a small moral engine out of a big public noise. The sentence is staged like a procession that refuses to march: not there, not there, but here. That triple turn of “not in... not in... but in...” works the way a sermon’s cadence works, except Longfellow’s pulpit is the 19th-century American street: booming, commercial, reputation-obsessed, newly mass-mediated. He’s writing in an era when “the throng” is becoming a force of modern life - political rallies, newspapers, public lectures, the first hints of celebrity culture. The line reads like an inoculation against it.

The intent isn’t to deny that crowds matter; it’s to demote them. “Clamor,” “shouts,” “plaudits” aren’t neutral sounds. They’re the whole economy of public validation, the quick hit of being seen and approved. By choosing those words, Longfellow frames the crowd as reactive and indiscriminate, a weather system that changes without warning. Triumph and defeat, he implies, become dangerously flimsy if they depend on that weather.

The subtext is a quiet insistence on interior sovereignty: your life can’t be outsourced. “In ourselves” is doing double duty - psychological (self-command) and moral (conscience). It’s also a subtle rebuke to a culture that equates winning with being watched winning. Longfellow’s trick is to make that rebuke sound soothing, almost consolatory, while smuggling in a tougher claim: the crowd’s verdict is not merely unreliable; it’s irrelevant to the only score that counts.