"One day, on sailing from London in the ship of a Captain Dixon, he heard a lady asking if there were a good stock of provisions on board.
"'You will not need a very large quantity,' said he. 'In a week, at two o'clock, we shall be in the port of Stockholm,' and it was so.
"The state of second sight, into which Swedenborg could pass at will in relation to earthly things, astonishing as it was to all who knew him, by it marvelous results, was no more than a weaker development of his power of seeing into the skies.
"Of all his visions, those in which he traveled to other astral worlds are not the least curious, and his descriptions are no doubt surprisingly artless in their details. A man whose great scientific acquirements are beyond question, who combined in his brain conception, will, and imagination, would certainly have invented something better if he had invented at all. Nor does the fantastic literature of the East contain anything that can have suggested the idea of this bewildering narrative full of poetic germs, if we may compare a work of faith to the writings of Arab fancy.
"The account of his being snatched up by the angel who guided him in his first voyage is sublime to a degree as far beyond the poems of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante, as the earth, by God's will, is from the sun. This chapter, which forms the introduction to his Treatise on the Astral Worlds, has never been published; it remains among the oral traditions left by Swedenborg to the three disciples who were dearest to him. M. Silverichm has it in writing. Baron Seraphitus sometimes tried to tell me of it; but his memory of his cousin was so vivid that he stopped after a few words, and fell into a reverie from which nothing could rouse him.
"The discourse in which the angel proved to Swedenborg that those planets are not created to wander uninhabited, crushes all human science, the Baron assured me, under the grandeur of its divine logic.
"According to the Seer, the inhabitants of Jupiter do not affect the sciences, which they call Shades; those of Mercury object to the expression of ideas by words, which they think too material, and they have a language of the eye; those of Saturn are persistently tormented by evil spirits; those of the Moon are as small as children of six years old, their voice proceeds from the stomach, and they creep about; those of Venus are of gigantic stature, but very stupid, and live by robbery; part of that planet, however, is inhabited by beings of great gentleness, who live loving to do good. Finally, he describes the customs of the people who dwell on those globes, and gives an account of the general purpose of their existence as part of the universe in terms so precise, adding explanations which agree so well with the effects of their apparent motion in the system of the universe, that some day, perhaps, scientific men will drink of these luminous founts. Here," said the pastor, taking down a volume and opening it at a page where a marker was placed, "these are the words which conclude this great work: 'If any one should doubt my having been transported to so many astral earths, let him remember my remarks as to distances in the other life. They exist only in relation to the external form of man; now I, having been inwardly constituted like the angelic spirits of those globes, have been enabled to know them.'
"The circumstances to which we owed the residence in this district of Baron Seraphitus, Swedenborg's dearly loved cousin, made me intimately familiar with every fact of the life of that extraordinary man.
"Not long since he was accused of imposture in some European newspapers, which reported the following facts as related in a letter from the Chevalier Beylon. Swedenborg, 'informed,' it was said, 'by some senators of a secret correspondence between the late Queen of Sweden and her brother, the Prince of Prussia, revealed the contents to that Princess, leaving her to believe that he had acquired the information by supernatural means. A man of the highest credit, Monsieur Charles-Léonard von Stahlhammer, Captain of the King's Guard and Knight of the Sword, refuted this calumny in a letter.'"
The pastor hunted through some papers in his table-drawer, found a newspaper, and handed it to Wilfrid, who read aloud the following letter: