'Tis a great difference. Behmen is healthily and
beautifully wise, notwithstanding the mystical narrowness and
incommunicableness. Swedenborg is disagreeably wise, and, with all his
accumulated gifts, paralyzes and repels.
It is the best sign of a great nature, that it opens a foreground,
and, like the breath of morning landscapes, invites us onward.
Swedenborg is retrospective, nor can we divest him of his mattock and
shroud. Some minds are forever restrained from descending into nature;
others are forever prevented from ascending out of it. With a force
of many men, he could never break the umbilical cord which held him
to nature, and he did not rise to the platform of pure genius.
It is remarkable that this man, who, by his perception of symbols, saw
the poetic construction of things, and the primary relation of mind
to matter, remained entirely devoid of the whole apparatus of poetic
expression, which that perception creates. He knew the grammar and
rudiments of the Mother-Tongue,--how could he not read off one strain
into music? Was he like Saadi, who, in his vision, designed to fill
his lap with the celestial flowers, as presents for his friends; but
the fragrance of the roses so intoxicated him, that the skirt dropped
from his hands? or, is reporting a breach of the manners of that
heavenly society? or, was it that he saw the vision intellectually,
and hence that chiding of the intellectual that pervades his books?
Be it as it may, his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no
relief to the dead prosaic level.
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