There's a Good Time Coming was a popular poem written by Charles Mackay and set to music by Henry Russell and was one of that composer of popular music's best-known works in the middle of the nineteenth century.
There's a good time coming, boys, a good time coming:
We may not live to see the day, but Earth shall glisten in the ray of the good time coming:
Cannonballs may aid the truth, But thought's a weapon stronger:
We'll win our battle with its aid;- Wait a little longer.
Independent testimony quoted by John Dodds indicates that the song was popular with new immigrants to the United States; it was recorded as being sung on the emigrant ships as they approached New York Harbour.
The pen shall supersede the sword,
And right not might, shall be the lord
In the good time coming;
Worth, not truth, shall rule mankind,
And be acknowledged stronger...
Famous quotes containing the words time and/or coming:
“What is a novel? I say: an invented story. At the same time a story which, though invented has the power to ring true. True to what? True to life as the reader knows life to be or, it may be, feels life to be. And I mean the adult, the grown-up reader. Such a reader has outgrown fairy tales, and we do not want the fantastic and the impossible. So I say to you that a novel must stand up to the adult tests of reality.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second- guessing in The New York Review of Books.”
—John Updike (b. 1932)