Citation (71)
In reading old texts, the greatest delight does not lie precisely in the verbal curiosa but, quite the reverse, the commonest words are given a mystic-homely emphasis: instead of ‘blue’ all one has to write is ‘blew’ & that banal word becomes at once important, isolated, of great value like the rarest jewel. That is the main sense of archaism: it hallows and ritualizes triviality. It is not just ordinary words which step out before us in hieratic actor’s masks, but the most elementary grammatical relationships and clause structures: subject—predicate, an attributive and its noun, co-ordination & subordination—all at once pop to the surface in these antiquated sentences like protruding veins or bone structures slipping out of overcooked fish: one sees before one’s eyes the embryonic grid of the language’s logic, the still flexible wax bones: “how nature Geometrizeth”—as Browne writes.