e plenty of
provisions on board. 'We do not want a great quantity,' he said; 'in
eight days and two hours we shall reach Stockholm,'--which actually
happened. This peculiar state of vision as to the things of the
earth--into which Swedenborg could put himself at will, and
which astonished those about him--was, nevertheless, but a feeble
representative of his faculty of looking into heaven.

"Not the least remarkable of his published visions is that in which he
relates his journeys through the Astral Regions; his descriptions
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 heig