experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
with a passport 'en regle' and properly 'vise'; and he held his light
course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He
had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
one Congregational Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such