Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/360

 344 CRITICAL STUDIES remote and charming beauty" indicated by Mr. Rossetti, and those "of a grotesque figurative rela- tion to things of another sphere;" I scarcely find with him "much that is disjointed and hopelessly obscure;" for it appears to me that, in spite of the headlong rush of the writing, the continuity pf thought is wonderfully well kept up, and that there is little or no obscurity as to the general scope and purpose, however much there may be in certain of the details, and in queer puzzling, random, stumbling phrases, due to the imperious exigences of speed, or the heavy burden of unprecious Swedenborgian Corre- spondences.* There are strange alternations and corroborate all I have urged in dispraise of its minutiae. In " Eng- land," a really vigorous summons to arouse from lethargy, dictated by Oliver Cromwell, the said dictator, among other queer words, utters this (p. 70): "This is my present nose." Similarly, Immanuel Kant, in the piece so entitled, declares (p. 248): — " I shall purge off my sloth. And have a new woj^. " Similarly again, in " Edgar Allan Poe," pp. 180, 182. The reader at once divines that more is meant than meets the ear. But what could have debased a writer with a real sensibility to poetic beauty, and a remarkable facility and even felicity of versification, to the absurd ugliness of these noses ? Alas, it is an heroic but fatally insensate sacrifice at the shrine of Swcdenborg, an abject submis- sion to the cold-blooded tyranny of the master. Study that diabo- lical dictionary of deliration, the Arcana Coclestia (it is only a dozen volumes, or 10,837 paragraphs), together with that light and entertaining work " The True Christian Religion," the "Apocalypse Explained" and the "Heaven and Hell," &c., &c., &a, and you may hope to master by some seven years' penal servitude the whole stupendous system of symbolism sclf-stultified. Or if you are, like myself, infinitely too frivolous even to attempt such a task, consult as I have done a "Dictionary of Correspondences, &c., from the writings of Swedenborg" (the one I have got hold of w.as published by Otis Clapp, School Street, Boston, in 1841), and if
 * Let me give an instance due to the latter, which may serve to