Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/94

78 noted in his diary that this day Swedenborg had asked for the hand of his daughter, Stina Maja, but she preferred a court chamberlain.16 There may have been other attempts which are not known, still his family thought of him as a hardened bachelor. In 1729 Ionas Unge (his rather unsympathetic brother—in-law) was giving him family advice in a letter:

"Why in the matter of marriage does d:brother let all the good chances go by?" And Unge recommended a pretty girl with a good dowry. She was only eleven, to be sure, but why did Emanuel not put in an application? Yet, though Unge buttressed his exhortation with a long Latin saw about the perils of delay, Emanuel did nothing about the matter.

Why did he let all the good chances slip by?

He neither needed nor wanted to marry for money, and, in eighteenth-century Stockholm, he did not have to marry for sex. His friend Robsahm has recorded that he had a mistress when he was young, whom he left because she was unfaithful to him, and to Tuxen he spoke of having had a mistress in Italy. In a diary, he wrote, no doubt exaggerating, that women were his chief passion. But even there he was careful not to cite names or incidents connected with real people. Very little is known directly about his emotional affairs. But it is known that, far from being a libertine, he grieved deeply over "wandering lust" and longed for a harmonious marriage with an intelligent woman.

It is possible that he did not marry because he had met and fallen in love with a woman who already was married.

An English Member of Parliament, C. A. Tulk, who revered Swedenborg's teachings and whose father had known him in London, said that "Swedenborg was in the habit of saying that he had seen in the spiritual world his future wife who was waiting for him there, and that she had been known in the world as a Countess Gyllenborg." 17

This Countess Elizabeth Stierncrona Gyllenborg, whom Swedenborg seems to have met in his early thirties, is reported to have been both attractive and fervently religious. Swedenborg was a friend of her brother and her husband, though later on, in his notes from the Beyond, he gives the husband a very bad name indeed. But not enough is known about the pious Elizabeth, herself a writer, to