Alas for America as I must so often say, the ungirt, the diffuse, the profuse, procumbent, one wide ground juniper, out of which no cedar, no oak will rear up a mast to the clouds! It all runs to leaves, to suckers, to tendrils, to miscellany. The air is loaded with poppy, with imbecility, with dispersion, & sloth.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph H. Orth, Glen M. Johnson (1994). “The Topical Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson”, p.76, University of Missouri Press