Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/18

8 Swedenborg was known to be as keenly active mentally as he had ever been, so sensible people found it hard to believe the absurd gossip.

Baron Tilas, a mineralogist of note and Swedenborg's successor on the Board of Mines, said just that: "Nor would I have lent credence to all this stuff, if I hadn't heard it from Count Tessin's own mouth," he wrote to a mineralogist friend.1

And Count Tessin had it from the man himself. Baron Tilas assured his friend that the town was in a state bordering on alarm about it, partly because of the suddenness of the disclosure. "Not a breath was heard, then it spread surprisingly fast. It is Swedenborg, who has intercourse with the dead whenever he chooses, and who can inquire after his former departed friends when it pleases him, whether they are in heaven or in hell or hover about in a third, nondescript place."

Count Tessin, Tilas wrote, had been told of a mutual departed friend, who was taking a walk in his other-world garden when Swedenborg came to ask him for some architectural drawing. Much more sensational news was that the late Swedish Queen had remarried in the world beyond and was said to be happy.

"I am all in a flutter," Baron Tilas continued, "before having a talk with him and learning whom my late wife has married. I should hate it if she has become a sultaness!"

But the oddest thing about Swedenborg was "that all this he reports without a screw seeming to be loose in the clock-work in other respects."

Tilas could hardly wait to peer into the clock-work for himself, and he assured his friend that he wished they might go together, only in that case Tilas would have to try to keep the latter from laughing.

Within a week the Baron's curiosity had been to a certain extent satisfied; he had visited Swedenborg and frankly asked him about the current rumors. Tilas wrote to his friend about it with a slightly modified laugh. "Many consider him crazy, but I desire to scan the matter more thoroughly before expressing myself upon it."

Other people of consequence were also visiting Swedenborg; their carriages waited for hours outside his house while the owners talked, listened, and considered.2 Now it became known that