Newly unearthed R.W. Emerson press from Oxford:
language as fossil poetry
"Emerson's notion of 'fossil poetry': 'just as in some fossil, curious and beautiful shapes of vegetable or animal life...are
permanently bound up with the stone, and rescued from that perishing which would otherwise have been theirs,- so in
words are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves'"
