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 there a, time and/or coming:
““Is there anybody there?” said the Traveller,
Knocking on the moonlit door;”
—Walter De La Mare (1873–1956)
“Miss U.S.A. is in the same graveyard that [Amanda Jones] the twelve-year-old is. Where the sixteen-year-old is. All the past selves. There comes a time when you have to bury those selves because you’ve grown into another one.”
—Amanda Theodosia Jones, U.S. beauty contest winner, Miss U.S.A., 1973. As quoted under the pseudonym “Emma Wright” in American Dreams, Prologue, by Studs Terkel (1980)
“With these I would be.
And with water: the waves coming forward, without cessation,
The waves, altered by sand-bars, beds of kelp, miscellaneous
driftwood,
Topped by cross-winds, tugged at by sinuous undercurrents
The tide rustling in, sliding between the ridges of stone,
The tongues of water, creeping in, quietly.”
—Theodore Roethke (1908–1963)