Louis Lambert — Honoré de Balzac, trans. Katharine Prescott Wormeley

‘** And, in fact, in whatever country he might be living, his doors were never shut, and he never lost anything.

‘‘When he was at Gothenburg, a town sixty miles away from Stockholm, three days before the news arrived of the great fire that raged at Stockholm, he had announced the hour at which it had begun, adding that his house was unharmed—which was true.

“The Queen of Sweden, when at Berlin, told the King, her brother, that one of her ladies being summonsed to repay a sum of money which she knew that her husband had returned before his death, being unable to find the receipt, had gone to Swedenborg and begged him to inquire of her husband where the proof of payment could be. On the following day Swedenborg told her the place where the receipt was; then, in accordance with the lady’s desire, he called upon the dead man to appear to his wife, and she saw her husband, in a dream, in the dressing-gown he had worn before his death, and he showed her the document in the place mentioned by Swedenborg, where in fact it lay hidden.

“One day, on sailing from London in the ship of a Captain Dixon, he heard a lady asking if there were a good stock of provisions on board.

‘*“*You will not need a very large quantity,’ said he.
‘In a week, at two o’clock, we shall be in the port of
Stockholm,’ and it was so.

“The state of second-sight, into which Swedenborg could pass at will in relation to earthly things, astonishing as it was to all who knew him, by its marvellous rejl uishliap. 59 sults, was no more than a weaker development of his power of seeing into the skies.

‘‘Of all his visions, those in which he travelled to other astral worlds are not the least curious, and his descriptions are no doubt surprisingly artless in their details. A man whose great scientific acquirements are beyond question, who combined in his brain conception, will, and imagination, would certainly have invented something better if he had invented at all. Nor does the fantastic literature of the Hast contain anything that can have suggested the idea of this bewildering narrative full of poetic germs, if we may compare a work of faith to the writings of Arab fancy.

‘“The account of his being snatched up by the angel who guided him in his first voyage is sublime to a degree as far beyond the poems of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante, as the earth, by God’s will, is from the sun. This chapter, which forms the introduction to his ‘Treatise on the Astral Worlds,’ has never been published; it remains among the oral traditions left by Swedenborg to the three disciples who were dearest to him. M. Silverichm has it in writing. Baron Seraphitus sometimes tried to tell me of it; but his memory of his cousin was so vivid that he stopped after a few words, and fell into a revery from which nothing could rouse him.

‘The discourse in which the angel proved to Swedenborg that those planets are not created to wander uninhabited, crushes all human science, the Baron assured me, under the grandeur of its divine logic.

‘‘ According to the Seer, the inhabitants of Jupiter do not affect the sciences, which they call Shades; those of Mercury object to the expression of ideas by words, which

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