d 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,
C. A. Tulk and Flaxman, were devoted Swedenborgians, and he told Tulk
that he had two different states, one in which he liked Swedenborg's
writings, and one in which he disliked them. Unquestionably, they
sometimes irritated him, and then he abused them, but it is only
necessary to read his annotations of his copy of Swedenborg's _Wisdom of
the Angels_ (now in the British Museum) to realise in the first place
that he sometimes misunderstood Swedenborg's position and secondly,
that when he did understand it, he was thoroughly in agreement with it,
and that he and the Swedish seer had much in common. Coleridge admired
Swedenborg, he gave a good deal of time to studying him (see Coleridge's
letter to C. A. Tulk, July 17, 1820), and he, with Boehme, were two of
the four "Great Men" unjustly branded, about whom he often thought of
writing a "Vindication" (Coleridge's Notes on Noble's Appeal, _Collected
Works_, ed. Shedd, 1853 and 1884, vol. v. p. 526).

Emerson owes much to Swedenborg,[7] and Emerson's thought had much
influence in England. Carlyle also was attracted to him (see his letter
from Chelsea, November 13, 1852); Mrs Browning studied him with
enthusiasm and spent the winter of 1852-3 in meditation on his
philosophy (_Letters_, vol. ii. p. 141), which bore fruit four years
later in _Aurora Leigh_.

Coventry Patmore is, however, the English writer most saturated with
Swedenborg's thought, and his _Angel in the House_ embodies the main
features of Swedenborg's peculiar views expressed in _Conjugial Love_,
on sex and marriage and their significance. It is not too much to say
that Swedenborg influenced and coloured the whole trend of Patmore's
thought, and that he was to him what Boehme was to Law, the match which
set alight his mystical flame. He says Swedenborg's _Heaven and Hell_
"abounds with perception of the truth to a degree unparalleled perhaps
in uninspired writing," and he asserts that he never tires of reading
him, "he is unfathomably profound and yet simple."[8]

Whatever may be the source or reason, it is clear that at the end of the
eighteenth century we begin to find a mystical tinge of thought in
several thinkers and writers, such as Burke, Coleridge, and Thomas
Erskine of Linlathen. This increases in the early nineteenth century,
st