cannot fail to astonish the reader, partly through the crudity of
their details. A man whose scientific eminence is incontestable, and
who united in his own person powers of conception, will, and
imagination, would surely have invented better if he had invented at
all. The fantastic literature of the East offers nothing that can give
an idea of this astounding work, full of the essence of poetry, if it
is permissible to compare a work of faith with one of oriental fancy.
The transportation of Swedenborg by the Angel who served as guide to
this first journey is told with a sublimity which exceeds, by the
distance which God has placed betwixt the earth and the sun, the great
epics of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante. This description, which
serves in fact as an introduction to his work on the Astral Regions,
has never been published; it is among the oral traditions left by
Swedenborg to the three disciples who were nearest to his heart.
Monsieur Silverichm has written them down. Monsieur Seraphitus
endeavored more than once to talk to me about them; but the
recollection of his cousin's words was so burning a memory that he
always stopped short at the first sentence and became lost in a revery
from which I could not rouse him."

The old pastor sighed as he continued: "The baron told me that the
argument by which the Angel proved to Swedenborg that these bodies are
not made to wander through space puts all human science out of sight
beneath the grandeur of a divine logic. According to the Seer, the
inhabitants of Jupiter will not cultivate the sciences, which they
call darkness; those of Mercury abhor the expression of ideas by
speech, which seems to them too material,--their language is ocular;
those of Saturn are continually tempted by evil spirits; those of the
Moon are as small as six-year-old children, their voices issue from
the abdomen, on which they crawl; those of Venus are gigantic in