Then added, significantly:—
Ask you my preference, what their hue?
Surely the safe, celestial blue.
He said: "Voice classified us. The harmonious voice tells of the harmonious soul. Millions of fiends are evoked in a breath by an irritated one. A gentle voice converts the Furies into Muses. The highest saint is not he who strives the most violently, but he upon whom goodness sits gracefully, whose strength is gentleness, duty loved, because spontaneous, and who wastes none of his power in effort; his will being one and above temptation. True love says, 'Come to my embrace, you are safer with me than you were with yourself, since I am wise above knowledge, and tasting of the apple.' The sequel is bliss and peace. But after fascination comes sorrow, remorse. The touch of the demonized soul is poison. Read Swedenborg's Hells, he added, and beware of demonized eyes!"
I never saw any one who seemed to purify words as Mr. Alcott does; with him nothing is common or unclean.
He then spoke of temperance in its widest sense, as being that which contributed to health of the whole being, body and soul alike. He said, "We should breakfast on sunrise and sup on sunset." And he read passages from Pythagoras, recommending music as a diet. "Pythagoras composed melodies for the night and morning, to purify the brain. He forbade his disciples the using of flesh meats, or drinks which heated and disturbed the brain, or hindered the music of dreams."
At this point of the conversation, Miss Bremer and Mr. Benzon, the Swedish consul, came in, and there was a slight pause.
Mr. Alcott then resumed the subject, and read Emerson's Bacchus, to which he gave new significance. When he had finished, he said, "This is the wine we want." He then spoke of the subject proposed for the evening's conversation, which was Enthusiasm, defining it as "an abandonment to the instincts. The seer," he said, "was one in whom memory predominated, and many of his visions were recollections rather of a former than revelations of a future state." This state of clairvoyance he named "thought a-bed, or philosophy recumbent"; and in this view he spoke of "Swedenborg, who was an enthusiast in the latter sense, and revealed remarkable things." He quoted a passage from Swedenborg's diary, wherein he speaks of his being created with the power of breathing inwardly, suspending his outward breathing, and in this way conversed with angels and spirits.
Miss Bremer asked Mr. Alcott "if he called Swedenborg an enthusiast."
Mr. Alcott said, "Swedenborg was in such fine relations with nature and spirit, that many things seemed revealed to him beyond the apprehension of ordinary men. He was a seer rather of supernatural than of spiritual things; a preternaturalist, rather than spiritualist. He had wonderful insights into nature, also, which science was almost every day confirming."