de Tocqueville, from Bruce

This is an excerpt from Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville in the section entitled "Why American Writers and Orators Often Use an Inflated Style." Considering human flight is an American invention I thought this might have a random connection.

"We have also seen, that, amongst democratic nations, the sources of poetry are grand, but not abudnant. They are exhausted: and poets, not finding the elements of the ideal in what is real and true, abandon them entirely and create monsters. I do not fear that the poetry of democratic nations will prove insipid, or that it will fly too near the ground; I rather apprehend that it will be forever losing itself in the cloouds, and that it will range at last to purely imaginary regions. I fear that the productions of democratic poets may often be surcharged with immense and incoherent imagery, with exaggerated descriptions and strange creations; and that the fantastic beings of their brain may sometimes make us regret the world of
reality."

Another one from the section entitled "Equality Suggests to the Americans the Idea of the Indefinite Perfectibility of Man" goes like this:

"I accost an American sailor, and inquire why the ships of his country are built so as to last but for a short time; he answers without hesitation, that the art of navigation is every day making such rapid progress, that the finest vessel would become almost useless if it lasted beyond a few years. In these words, which fell accidently, and on a particular subject, from an
uninstructed man, I recognized the general and systematic idea upon which a great people direct all their concerns.

Aristocratic nations are naturally to apt to narrow the scope of human perfectibility; democratic nations, to expand it beyond reason."