Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/49

 bly acquired at the university, is not left behind with the college halls, but becomes the young man's recreation in the interval of severer studies for some years after graduation.

When his course was finished at the university, he appears to have gone to his father's home at Brunsbo. But in July he wrote, asking the aid of Benzelius to start him on his travels, then an essential part of a young man's education. He asked, in particular, letters to some one in an English college, in order that he might improve himself in mathematics, or in physics and natural history. "As I have always desired," he said, "to turn to some practical use, and also to perfect myself more in, the studies which I selected with your advice and approval, I thought it advisable to choose a subject early which I might elaborate in course of time, and into which I might introduce much of what I should notice and read in foreign countries. This course I have always pursued hitherto in my reading; and now, at my departure, I propose to myself, as far as concerns mathematics, gradually to gather and work up a certain collection, namely, of things discovered and to be discovered in mathematics,—or, what is nearly the same thing, the progress made in mathematics during the last one or two centuries." "Much kind love" he sends to his sister Anna.

Never idle, he adds by the bye that, since leaving Upsal, he has acquired the manual art of bookbinding. In March of the next year, his travels having been delayed, he writes that he has made such progress in music as occasionally to take the organist's place at church.

In 1710, the necessary royal permission having been obtained by the solicitation of his father, Emanuel at last set out on his travels in pursuit of his education, though not without further hindrance on the way. We find in his Itinerary,—

"I travelled to Gottenburg, and thence by ship to London. On the way to London I was four times in danger of my life. First, from a sand-bank on the English coast in a dense fog,