Ambrose Bierce

When I was young and full of faith And other fads that youngsters cherishA cry rose as of one that saith With emphasis: "Help or I perish
"'Twas heard in all the land, and men The sound were each to each repeating
It made my he...

Have but one God: thy knees were sore   If bent in prayer to three or four
Adore no images save those   The coinage of thy country shows
Take not the Name in vain
Direct   Thy swearing unto some effect

Father
whose hard and cruel law  Is part of thy compassion's plan,  Thy works presumptuously we
For what the prophets say they saw
Unbidden still the awful slope  Walling us in we climb to gain  Assurance of the shining

The pig is taught by sermons and
To think the God of Swine has snout and bristles
Judibras
Composition date is unknown - the above date represents the first publication date

How blest the land that counts among Her sons so many good and wise, To execute great feats of tongue When troubles rise
Behold them mounting every stump, By speech our liberty to guard
Observe their courage—see them jump, And come down ...

The flabby wine-skin of his
Yields to some pathologic strain,
And voids from its unstored
The driblet of an aphorism

II know not if it was a dream
I viewedA city where the restless multitude,
Between the eastern and the western
Had reared gigantic fabrics, strong and rude

Once I dipt into the future far as human eye could see, And I saw the Chief Forecaster, dead as any one can be— Dead and damned and shut in Hades as a liar from his birth, With a record of unreason seldome paralleled on earth
While I looked h...

O Liberty,
God-gifted— Young and immortal maid— In your high hand uplifted, The torch declares your trade
Its crimson menace, flaming Upon the sea and shore, Is, trumpet-like, proclaiming That Law shall be no more
Austere incendiary...

That land full surely hastens to its
Where public sycophants in homage
The populace to flatter, and
The doubled echoes of its loud conceit

Thou shalt no God but me adore: 'Twere too expensive to have more
No images nor idols make For Roger Ingersoll to break
Take not God's name in vain: select A time when it will have effect
Work not on Sabbath days at all, But go to s...

I
AW—’t was in a dream, the other night—A man whose hair with age was thin and white;  One hundred years had bettered by his birth,
And still his step was firm, his eye was bright
Before him and about him pressed a crowd