Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/59

V ] Sweden was no more puritan in that respect than England—it was a release into the freedom of following his chief passion. This was not the passion for women, though he was later to confess it so to his diary in a period of self-deprecation.4 It was ambition, the keen, complex, all-absorbing and forward-striving ambition of the vigorous young intellectual. He had at last come to the headquarters of the knowledge he was thirsting for, measurable knowledge, exact science, a thrilling end in itself, but also the ladder to fame.

To the furthering of ambition Emanuel brought all his zest and energy, making even his disadvantages serve. Was he too poor to take "good" lodgings in the neighborhood of "fair Pell Mell"? Then he lodged from the very beginning with artisans whose trades he wanted to learn for the sake of science, and perhaps he even got the rent reduced in return for his help.5

Besides learning a craft or two that first summer in London, he studied the language and haunted the bookstalls. "I read Newton daily." He went on an orgy of buying scientific instruments, "prisms, various kinds of quadrants, microscopes, artificial scales, a camera obscura," and he hoped to have enough left over to buy an "air pump," an instrument about which he was almost tenderly passionate.

His London life comes to us in his letters to Benzelius 6 to whom he said after about five months, "If you were to inquire about myself, dearest brother, I know myself to be alive but not happy; for I long for you and home. If I chance to see a letter from you, it carries me back as it were to my fatherland, for I love and revere you not only more than my brothers, but even as a parent." And he signed himself, "your disciple and lover even to death."

But that was his only expressed homesickness. Paper seems to have been scarce, and his letters were usually so crowded to the margin with his scientific adventures that there was often no space left even for his signature. Having been in London for less than a year, he wrote in his polyglot Swedish, English, Latin, adding Swedish endings to foreign words, "That my Brother encourages me to Mathesien [exact sciences] is a matter I should rather be discouragerad in, since I have an immoderate desire thereto without this and especially to Astronomien and Meclhaniken. I make good use of most of my lodgings that I take here. First I was with a