Emerson

I am currently revisiting Raymond Carney's American vision: The films of Frank Capra, and in the chapter 'Frank Capra and American Romanticism', Carney offers a quotation from Emerson's 'The Divinity School Address' which I also feel compelled to reproduce:

All attempts to contrive a new system are as cold as the new worship introduced by the French to the goddess of Reason - today pasteboard and filigree and ending tomorrow in madness and murder. Rather let the breath of new life be breathed by you through the forms already existing. For, if once you are alive, you shall find they become plastic and new. The remedy of their deformity is first, soul, and second, soul, and evermore, soul. A whole popedom of forms, one pulsation of virtue can uplift and vivify.