Dryden’s?  Was ever style more heavy and monotonous than that of Swedenborg in his theological works?  But I have read Dryden, not indeed without pleasure in his masterly exquisite ease and sureness of statement and his occasional touches of admirable good sense, yet with no slightest liberation of spirit, with no degree, greater or less, of that magical and marvellous evocation, of inward resource, whose blessed surprise now and then in life makes for us angelic moments, and feelingly persuades us that our earth also is a star and in the sky.  On the other hand, I once read Swedenborg’s “Angelic Wisdom concerning the Divine Love and the Divine Wisdom” with such enticement, such afflatus, such quickening and heightening of soul, as I cannot describe without seeming excessive.  Until half through the book, I turned every page with the feeling that before another page I might see the chasm between the real and phenomenal worlds fairly bridged over.  Of course, it disappointed me in the end; but what of that?  To have kindled and for a time sustained the expectation which should render possible such disappointment was a benefit that a whole Bodleian Library might fail to confer.  These benefits come to us not from the writer as such, but from the man behind the writer.  He who dwells aloft amid the deathless orient imaginations of the human race, easily inhabiting their atmosphere as his native element,—­about him, and him only, are the halos and dawns of immortal youth; and his speech, though with many babyish or barbarous fancies, many melancholies and vices of the blood compounded, carries nevertheless some refrain of divine hilarity, that beguiles men of their sordidness, their sullenness, and low cares, they know not how nor why.

* * * * *

PILGRIMAGE TO OLD BOSTON.

We set out at a little past eleven, and made our first stage to Manchester.  We were by this time sufficiently Anglicized to reckon the morning a bright and sunny one; although the May sunshine was mingled with water, as it were, and distempered with a very bitter east-wind.

Lancashire is a dreary county, (all, at least, except its hilly portions,) and I have never passed through it without wishing myself anywhere but in that particular spot where I then happened to be.  A few places along our route were historically interesting; as, for example, Bolton, which was the scene of many remarkable events in the Parliamentary War, and in the market-square of which one of the Earls of Derby was beheaded.  We saw, along the way-side, the never-failing green fields, hedges, and other monotonous features of an ordinary English landscape.  There were little factory villages, too, or larger towns, with their tall chimneys, and their pennons of black smoke, their uglinesses of brick-work, and their heaps of refuse matter from the furnace, which seems to be the only kind of stuff which Nature cannot take back to herself and resolve into the elements, when man has thrown it aside.  These hillocks of waste and effete mineral always disfigure the neighborhood of ironmongering towns, and, even after a considerable antiquity, are hardly made decent with a little grass.