Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/36

24 attentive and they obey. Being in this state, they accept whatever life offers and hence, without knowing why, their manners are good and they learn to talk." 9

One can almost see the polite, quiet little Swedish child, solemnly blue-eyed. It must be remembered that Swedenborg had no children of his own, except the child he had once been.

Elsewhere he describes children playing ball and other mildly competitive games under the eyes of their parents and tutors. He observes how "the least inanimate object seems to them alive, when they're at their little pastimes." Few things so shocked him as when once in London he saw parents egging on their children to fight, for money.

When Emanuel was eight years of age, his mother died. She was in her thirtieth year. She had borne nine children, five boys and four girls. Albrecht, her first-born, died ten days after her. Eliezer died later.

Her husband paid tribute to her sweetness, gentleness, and kindness, and remarried within a year.

God again, Swedberg says, provided him with the right kind of wife, by letting him be the means of bringing a young rake to a deathbed conversion, and thus drawing his attention to the young man's wealthy aunt.

Their marriage was arranged before he had had a chance to meet her, but he had managed to find out that she was "godfearing, pious, generous to the poor, wealthy, handsome, a clever housekeeper, and had no children."

Only he can tell what follows: "Two days before the wedding I arrived in Stockholm where she also had arrived two days previously. I was brought into a room where she was sitting alone, but I didn't know it was she, I couldn't imagine it as nobody had told me. I sit down next to her. We talk for a long while about this and that like the strangers we were. Until at last she asks: 'What does the Professor think of our bargain?' I answer, 'What kind of bargain?'—'The one you wrote to me about.' 'What did I write to you about? I don't know of anything.'—'Aren't we to be bride and groom tomorrow?'—'Is that who you are!' I said. And so we confirmed our friendship with handshakes and loving embraces and such like, with mutual pleasure and contentment."