asps, hemorrhoids, presters, and flying serpents; literary men are
conjurers and charlatans.

But this topic suggests a sad afterthought, that here we find the seat
of his own pain. Possibly Swedenborg paid the penalty of introverted
faculties. Success, or a fortunate genius, seems to depend on a happy
adjustment of heart and brain; on a due proportion, hard to hit, of
moral and mental power, which, perhaps, obeys the law of those chemical
ratios which make a proportion in volumes necessary to combination,
as when gases will combine in certain fixed rates, but not at any rate.
It is hard to carry a full cup: and this man, profusely endowed in
heart and mind, early fell into dangerous discord with himself. In his
Animal Kingdom, he surprises us, by declaring that he loved analysis,
and not synthesis; and now, after his fiftieth year, he falls into
jealousy of his intellect; and, though aware that truth is not solitary,
nor is goodness solitary, but both must ever mix and marry, he makes
war on his mind, takes the part of the conscience against it, and, on
all occasions, traduces and blasphemes it. The violence is instantly
avenged. Beauty is disgraced, love is unlovely, when truth, the half
part of heaven, is denied, as much as when a bitterness in men of
talent leads to satire, and destroys the judgment. He is wise, but
wise in his own despite. There is an air of infinite grief, and the
sound of wailing, all over and through this lurid universe. A vampyre
sits in the seat of the prophet, and turns with gloomy appetite to the
images of pain. Indeed, a bird does not more readily weave its nest,
or a mole bore into the ground, than this seer of souls substructs a
new hell and pit, each more abominable than the last, round every new
crew of offenders. He was let down through a column that seemed of
brass, but it was formed of angelic spirits, that he might descend
safely amongst the unhappy, and witness the vastation of souls; and