Excerpt from A Library of American Literature, Vol. 6 of 10: From the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time Institutions may crumble and governments fall, but it is only that they may renew a better youth. The petals of the flower Wither, that fruit may form. The desire of perfection, springing always from moral power, rules even the sword, and escapes unharmed from the field of car' nage; giving to battles all that they can have of lustre, and to warriors their only glory; surviving martyrdoms, and safe amid the wreck of states. On the banks of the stream of time, not a monument has been raised to a hero or a nation but tells the tale and renews the hope of improvement. Each people that has disappeared, every institution that has passed away, has been a step in the ladder by which humanity ascends toward the perfecting of its nature. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.