Ralph Waldo Emerson: Vascular & alive

I've been enjoying the selected writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, especially his diary. Some of his entries are one-sentence thoughts, but others are little mini-arguments and musings.

For instance:

"June 24(?), 1840: The language of the street is always strong. What can describe the folly & emptiness of scolding like the word jawing? I feel too the force of the double negative, though clean contrary to our grammar rules. And I confess to some pleasure from the stinging rhetoric of a rattling oath in the mouth of truckmen & teamsters. How laconic & brisk it is by the side of a page of the North American Review. Cut these words & they would bleed; they are vascular & alive; they walk & run. Moreover they who speak them have this elegancy, that they do not trip in their speech. It is a shower of bullets, whilst Cambridge men & Yale men correct themselves & begin again at every half sentence…"

Apart from the observation he's making, I love the language: folly & emptiness, rattling oath, shower of bullets. And that bit about words being "vascular & alive" is enough to carry this blog entry.