picnic, or French distribution of prizes to virtuous peasants. Strange,
scholastic, didactic, passionless, bloodless man, who denotes classes of
souls as a botanist disposes of a carex, and visits doleful hells as a
stratum of chalk or hornblende! He has no sympathy. He goes up and down
the world of men, a modern Rhadamanthus in gold-headed cane and peruke,
and with nonchalance, and the air of a referee, distributing souls. The
warm, many-weathered, passionate-peopled world is to him a grammar of
hieroglyphs, or an emblematic freemason's procession. How different is
Jacob Behmen! he is tremulous with emotion, and listens awe-struck, with
the gentlest humanity, to the Teacher whose lessons he conveys; and when
he asserts that, "in some sort, love is greater than God," his heart
beats so high that the thumping against his leathern coat is audible
across the centuries. '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