Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/218

202 nights and early mornings in the house set in a large garden which he bought soon after his return.

He lived on Södermalm, a rocky island, part of that water-gleaming tracery of sea and lake and inhabited cliffs that make up the silvery splendor of Stockholm. If he walked a short distance to the edge of the rocks he could see the grand panorama almost in its entirety, nor had he very far to walk or drive to get to the stately center of the town, passing along quays where shipping from all the world furled its sails, restless in the bright living waters, for Stockholm is no stagnant Venice.

It was the first home Swedenborg had had of his own, and it was to be a permanent one, to which he returned after his many journeys. Judging by the many times he praised the ideal marriage in which there was no domination of either partner by the other, but perfect abandonment of self, he must have hoped to settle into just such a home with that ideal wife. But he was now fifty-seven, and instead of the wife he settled into his house with his mission.

The great work on the brain was not to see light until the twentieth century. The third part of Of the Worship and Love of God was not published by him either. He deprecated it, feeling that now he had more important work in hand. He was cool and methodical, however, in laying the foundation of his new work. While he was still in London he began the first of his several gigantic indexes to Biblical passages. One ran to eight hundred passages. Swedenborg as early as when he was thirty-two wrote to Eric Benzelius that "my head does not well recall things from memory"; 1 and indeed he always scorned "memory-knowledge." His indexes were his memory, besides which he numbered almost every paragraph he ever wrote, so that he could refer and crossrefer. He already was familiar with Greek and now he refreshed his Hebrew. But even before he could depend on the latter he began to interpret the Bible by the aid of carefully compared Latin versions.

Was it his own, this tumultuous spate of words that runs into eight big volumes as now published? 2 He said that what he was writing here was not his own, not one least word of it. It was inspired.

No doubt he felt freer to write this in a house of his own, belted