"His followers claimed that he anticipated important discoveries, both in natural as in spiritual science, and that his merits were enhanced by his claim to supernatural illumination. And whatever his gifts, how assisted, whether by agencies supernatural or preternatural, their operations were of wonderful sweep, his insights surpassing, transcending the comprehension of any successor; of a kind that have led some to suspect that he staggered down under the weight of his endowments. Certainly, he stands, like Boehme, an exceptional mind, in the order of nature, and awaits an interpreter to determine his place in the world of thought. He is the most eminent example furnished in modern biography of the possibilities of the metempsychosis, as if we saw in him an ability to translate himself at will, personally, wheresoever he would, taking his residence for the while in plant, animal, mineral, atom, with the superadded faculty of ravishing its secret. Nor content with this, he ransacks the primeval elements, the limbos of chaos and night. What burglaries he perpetrates! picking of locks, slitting of mysteries, opening rents into things sacred and profane,—of these no end. Then such edifices rising from regions of vagary and shadow, a goblin world, grand, grotesque, seldom lighted from above, or tipped with azure. His heavens had no prospects; no perspective; his hells were lurid; the pit bottomless, a Stygian realm throughout. His genius plunges, seldom soars; is not fledged, but footed; his heaven but the cope of the abyss in plain sight of the doomed. His angels are spectral, unwholesome; his celestials too knowing to be innocent.
"It were a fruitless task to follow him from starting-point to goal, if goal there be, in his restless racing throughout nature. The ghost-seer of shadow-land, whereinto he smuggled all natural things as spiritual phantoms; he needs be studied with due drawback of doubt, as to the veracity of his claim to divine illumination. Still with every abatement, here is a body of truth none can gainsay nor resist; abysses not yet fathomed by any successor, naturalist, or spiritualist."
After this surprising statement of his views of Swedenborg, Miss Bremer asked more questions about Mr. Alcott's definition of an Enthusiast, adding: "Christ, then, if we speak of him as a man, was an enthusiast."
Mr. Alcott, smiling, said, "Yes, the divinest of enthusiasts, surrendering himself entirely to the instincts of the Spirit; might safely do so, being holy, whole, inspired throughout all his gifts, his whole Personality,—the divine fire pervaded every part; therefore he was the celestial man."
The conversation here turned upon Nature, in some way which I do not now recollect, and Mr. Alcott spoke of the great mission of the prophet of nature.
"The public child of earth and sky."
"Nature," he said, "was more to some persons than others; they standing in closer relations to it."
"But nature," said Miss Bremer, "is not wholly good."
"No," said Mr. Alcott; "there is something of Fate in her, too, as in some persons. She, too, is a little bitten."
The expression seemed to amuse her, for she repeated it several times, laughing.