Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/64

50 various theological works, but the main stream of his energy went into "mechaniken," by that he was intoxicated, not by mysticism. Literal wheels within wheels spun in his head, not those of the first chapter of Ezekiel. Moreover, the Platonists had been centered at Cambridge in the seventeenth century, and Emanuel went to Oxford in the beginning of the eighteenth.

But John Norris, "disciple and correspondent" of Henry More, one of the chief Platonists, was a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford; he lived till 1711, and Emanuel had, even before he went to Oxford, read a little book by Norris which interested him a good deal. It was the Reflections upon the Conduct of Human Life, and while Emanuel found it "very subtil and ingenious," yet he was puzzled by it, finding himself "in suspens as to what may be his conclusion and as to what he would have."

It was not like Emanuel to remain in suspense for long and, being at Oxford for half a year with the Bodleian Library at hand, he probably continued his reading of Norris and was led by him to look into like-minded works. Perhaps it was only part of the reaching out in all directions of his "admirable curiosity," but one cannot fail to see this little rill as part of the headwaters of the stream that was later to carry him into the ocean of mysticism. The charts he was to use bear too great a resemblance to those of Plotinus for this to be an accident, even though the knowledge he may have acquired at Oxford slept forgotten by his conscious mind.

At Oxford he wrote some poetry. He told Benzelius that he was doing it to acquire fame as well as to recover from his speculations in "mechaniken," but, Emanuel being ardent, handsome, and twenty-four, personal feeling undoubtedly was the real dynamo. It was in Latin. One was translated from English, changing "Chloe" to "Delia." Some Englishwomen had been greatly interested in the Cambridge Platonists, and in any case Latin was part of education and Englishwomen had not yet reached Victorian ignorance.

It was not a remarkable poem as poem.9 Her breast more white than snow made snow melt into tears and slip down her milkwhite limbs, standing "like a string of pearls about her garment's hem."