Peter

__** American Romanticism **__ **“//America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great//.”** —//Alexis de Tocqueville, __Democracy in America__// "Love, whether newly born, or aroused from a deathlike slumber, must always create sunshine, fillingthe heart so full of radiance, that it overflows upon the outward world." —//F. Scott Fitzgerald, __The Great Gatsby__//

"I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes — a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder." —//F. Scott Fitzgerald, __The Great Gatsby__// "He had committed himself to the following of a grail" — //F. Scott Fitzgerald,// //__ The Great Gatsby __//

To The American Soul A reflection on American Romanticism