Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/51

 in which his oratorio of the Messiah could be conceived and born into the world. Pope, a few months younger than Swedenborg, was just issuing his Essay on Criticism. Addison and Steele were publishing the Tatler, soon to be followed by the Spectator. Dr. Isaac Watts was preaching kindly sermons in Mark Lane; and Sir Christopher Wren was putting the finishing touches to the Cathedral of St. Paul.

In April, 1711, Swedenborg writes from London, delighted to execute the commission of Benzelius for the purchase of a telescope twenty-four feet in length, a microscope, and sundry books. "I visit daily," he says, "the best mathematicians here in town. I have been with Flamsteed, who is considered the best astronomer in England, and who is constantly taking observations, which, together with the Paris observations, will give us some day a correct theory respecting the motion of the moon and of its appulse to the fixed stars. . . . Newton has laid a good foundation for correcting the irregularities of the moon, in his Principia. . . . You encourage me to go on with my studies; but I think that I ought rather to be discouraged, as I have such an 'immoderate desire' for them, especially for astronomy and mechanics. I also turn my lodgings to some use, and change them often. At first I was at a watchmaker's, afterwards at a cabinetmaker's, and now I am at a mathematical-instrument maker's. From them I steal their trades, which some day will be of use to me. I have recently computed for my own pleasure several useful tables for the latitude of Upsal, and all the solar and lunar eclipses which will take place between 1712 and 1721. . . . In undertaking in astronomy to facilitate the calculation of eclipses, and of the motion of the moon outside that of the syzygies, and also in undertaking to correct the tables so as to agree with the new observations, I shall have enough to do. . . . Grabe's Septuagint was recently published. . . . He was here for some time, but he had to change his lodgings every week; he was so over-run by visitors. . . . I have