The Tell-Tale Heart’s Epigraph

I just discovered that Poe used the fourth stanza of Longfellow’s poem, A Psalm of Life, as an epigraph in the original 1843 publication of The Tell-Tale Heart (the same year Dickens published, A Christmas Carol). It works as an ominous foreshadowing of the role that the sound of the beating heart will play in the life/mind/conscience of the nameless narrator of the story. “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.”