Life & Wisdom Quote by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Rest is framed here not as a reward for virtue but as wages for effort. Longfellow’s tidy couplet turns sleep into a moral economy: attempt something, do something, and you’ve earned the only luxury that can’t be faked - a quiet mind at night. The rhyming certainty (“done”/“repose”) is the point. It sounds like a lullaby, but it’s also a work ethic in miniature, calibrated for a 19th-century America busy manufacturing both goods and character.

The intent is gently disciplinary. Longfellow isn’t cheering grand achievements; he’s lowering the bar to make action itself the antidote to anxious self-reproach. “Something attempted” matters because it acknowledges failure as part of the bargain, then rescues the speaker from the paralysis of perfectionism. The subtext is that unrest comes from the sense of wasted time: the mind races when it believes the day was squandered. By linking repose to tangible effort, he offers a secular form of absolution - not God’s forgiveness, but the conscience’s.

Context helps explain the line’s polish. Longfellow was a popular, institution-building poet: accessible, didactic, designed to be memorized. The meter and capitalization give the sentiment a proverb’s authority, as if it arrived pre-approved by tradition. It’s aspirational propaganda for steadiness: a culture telling itself that the decent life is made of small completed acts, and that peace is less a mood than a receipt you can earn.