Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/65

V ] But some were addressed to a person who had charmed him by her playing and singing, music-loving as he was and brought up in a household where music was part of daily life.

This is what he said to her: "Tell me why the string which is touched by a beautiful maiden sounds richer in nature and delights! Why she instils her songs with a certain Nymphean nectar? Why the voice sounds sweetly from this more beautiful mouth? Whatever she loves to say flows from the mouth of the saying; and she touches with her lips every little word. When love is the twin in singing, not songs alone, nor the lips, but the voice of one sweetly singing is what is loved."

This poem was entitled, "To a Poetess—Why her Songs give me Pleasure." It might have been impersonal. But then he wrote "To the Same That She may Answer me": and said, "Not alone do I love the fingers, the tongue, the lips, of the eloquent one, on which so oft would I bestow my kisses; but whatever thou movest when thou dost utter thy songs. For it is thy whole moving body I love. Happy shall I be if perchance our love shall bring forth a little muse or a short letter."

These are meager clues to Emanuel's emotional life. He was always reticent about himself. Yet here is the beginning of his attitude toward sex, one that he was to carry from earth to heaven. When the flood of gossip burst in Stockholm in 1759 about Swedenborg's visions, much of the hilarious amazement was due to the misunderstood news of arrangements and rearrangements of marriages in the other world. When he was eighty, he wrote a book of his philosophy of sex, Conjugial Love. In all its impersonality, with heads and subheads, it was his most personal book. "Other-worldly" only in part, much of it was devoted to the problem of sex for young and ardent men who couldn't afford to marry. The problem as he saw it was how "lust" could become "human love." Not that he altogether condemned the young for the lust which was "love of the sex," even if it took the form of "fornication." He laid down as one of his axioms "That with some men the love of the sex cannot without harm be restrained from going forth into fornication. There is no need to recount the injuries which excessive restraint of the love of the sex may cause with those who from superabundance suffer from intense venereal excitement. Hence are the