Library of the best American literature / Containing the lives of our authors in story form, their portraits, their homes, and their personal traits, how they worked and what they wrote; choice selections from eminent writers, embracing great American poets and novelists, foremost women in American letters, distinguished critics and essayists, our national humorists, noted journalists and magazine contributors, popular writers for young people, great orators and public lecturers

by Unknown

Though with no better sickles than our swords.

My soul is not a palace of the past,

Where outworn creeds, like Rome’s gray senate, quake,

Hearing afar the Vandal’s trumpet hoarse,

That shakes old systems with a thunder-fit.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change;

Then let it come: I have no dread of what

Is call’d for by the instinct of mankind;

Nor think I that God’s world will fall apart

Because we tear a parchment more or less.