Page:The Life and Mission of Emanuel Swedenborg.djvu/53

 eries. . . . When the plates for the globes arrive in Sweden, Professor Elfvius will perhaps take care to have them printed and made up. I shall send a specimen very soon; but no impression is to be sold." In this same letter he mentions valuable English books, and names all the principal poets as well worth reading for the sake of their imagination alone. In mild terms he complains of his father's not supplying him better with money; and we find the complaint quite pardonable when we remember that the father was borrowing his children's inheritance from their mother for his own enterprises, and when we learn that Emanuel had received from him but two hundred rixdalers (about two hundred, and twenty-five dollars) in sixteen months. He says it is hard to live without food or drink.

Writing again to Benzelius, August, 1712, he repeats his confidence in his new method of finding the longitude, which Dr. Halley admitted to him orally was the only good method that had been proposed. "But," he adds, "as I have not met with great encouragement here in England, among this civil and proud people, I have laid it aside for some other place. When I tell them that I have some project about longitude, they treat it as an impossibility; and so I do not wish to discuss it here. . . . As my speculations made me for a time not so sociable as is serviceable and useful for me, and as my spirits are somewhat exhausted, I have taken refuge for a short time in the study of poetry, that I might be somewhat recreated by it, I intend to gain a little reputation by this study, on some occasion or other, during this year, and I hope I may have advanced in it as much as may be expected from me,—but time and others will perhaps judge of this. Still, after a time, I intend to take up mathematics again, although at present I am doing nothing in them; and if I am encouraged, I intend to make more discoveries in them than any one else in the present age. But without encouragement this would be sheer trouble, and it would be like non profecturis litora bubus arare,—ploughing the ground with stubborn steers.