say is just as true without the tedious use of that
symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra,
instead of this trite rhetoric,--universal signs,
instead of these village symbols,--and we shall both
be gainers. The history of hierarchies seems to show
that all religious error consisted in making the
symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing
but an excess of the organ of language.

Swedenborg, of all men in the recent ages, stands
eminently for the translator of nature into thought.
I do not know the man in history to whom things
stood so uniformly for words. Before him the
metamorphosis continually plays. Everything on which
his eye rests, obeys the impulses of moral nature.
The figs become grapes whilst he eats them. When
some of his angels affirmed a truth, the laurel twig
which they held blossomed in their hands. The noise
which at a distance appeared like gnashing and
thumping, on coming nearer was found to be the voice
of disputants. The men in one of his visions, seen in
heavenly light, appeared like dragons, and seemed in
darkness; but to each other they appeared as men, and
when the light from heaven shone into their cabin,
they complained of the darkness, and were compelled
to shut the window that they might see.

There was this perception in him which makes the poet
or seer an object of awe and terror, namely that the
same man or society of men may wear one aspect to