Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/380

362 He too had that gift. Before his eyes, as before that of the angels of the inmost heaven, all things seemed "to laugh, to play and to live."

He could see the sky covered with dark red roses. If he had seen the ape-men and the leopard—men, he had also seen the angel-men.

Swedenborg enjoyed "a sound mind, memory and understanding to the last hour of his life," so Elizabeth Reynolds and Richard Shearsmith reported, swearing it before the Mayor of London at the Guildhall, on November 24, 1775, because tongues had wagged, saying that Swedenborg had retracted everything just before he died.

In that document, so elegantly lettered by the Guildhall clerk, to which Elizabeth had set her mark and Shearsmith his signature, it was also set forth that they never did, either directly or indirectly, hear Swedenborg express or imply such an idea as that of retraction, nor did any person or persons visit him either the day before or the day on which he died, which was the twenty-ninth of March, 1772.

By his bedside, the document said, were Mrs. Shearsmith (who died soon after) and Elizabeth. The wife of the barber, and the maid: two simple East End Londoners, of those people whom he had described as the best of the Christians.

About five o'clock of that Sunday, Swedenborg asked the two women what time it was. They told him, and he thanked them, saying it was good. "In about ten minutes after, he heaved a gentle sigh and expired in the most tranquil manner."

From every human life, cast into the pool of time, waves circle out, big or little, even after that life has disappeared from time. No one knows how far they reach. The life of Emanuel Swedenborg continued to touch many lives, even after his body, that "outworn garment," had been laid in a triple coffin in the Swedish church in London.

One day the wigmaker and barber Shearsmith was visited by a stranger who begged to see Swedenborg's rooms and asked to be shown where Swedenborg used to stand. The wigmaker told him