things, and that the most essential part of a person's nature, that
which he carries with him into the spiritual world, is his love. He
teaches that heaven is not a place, but a condition, that there is no
question of outside rewards or punishments, and man makes his own heaven
or hell; for, as Patmore pointedly expresses it--

Ice-cold seems heaven's noble glow
To spirits whose vital heat is hell.

He insists that Space and Time belong only to physical life, and when
men pass into the spiritual world that love is the bond of union, and
thought or "state" makes presence, for thought is act. He holds that
instinct is spiritual in origin; and the principle of his science of
correspondences is based on the belief that everything outward and
visible corresponds to some invisible entity which is its inward and
spiritual cause. This is the view echoed by Mrs Browning more than once
in _Aurora Leigh_--

There's not a flower of spring,
That dies in June, but vaunts itself allied
By issue and symbol, by significance
And correspondence, to that spirit-world
Outside the limits of our space and time,
Whereto we are bound.

In all this and much more, Swedenborg's thought is mystical, and it has
had a quite unsuspected amount of influence in England, and it is
diffused through a good deal of English literature.

Blake knew some at least of Swedenborg's books well; two of his friends,