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There is a moment in the history of every nation, when, proceeding out
of this brute youth, the perceptive powers reach their ripeness and have
not yet become microscopic: so that man, at that instant, extends across
the entire scale, and, with his feet still planted on the immense forces
of night, converses by his eyes and brain with solar and stellar creation.
That is the moment of adult health, the culmination of power.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men
Quoted in F.O. Matthiessen, American Renaissance
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