who protects my door.’  In fact, no matter in what country he made his abode he never closed his doors, and nothing was ever stolen from him.  At Gottenburg—­a town situated some sixty miles from Stockholm—­he announced, eight days before the news arrived by courier, the conflagration which ravaged Stockholm, and the exact time at which it took place.  The Queen of Sweden wrote to her brother, the King, at Berlin, that one of her ladies-in-waiting, who was ordered by the courts to pay a sum of money which she was certain her husband had paid before his death, went to Swedenborg and begged him to ask her husband where she could find proof of the payment.  The following day Swedenborg, having done as the lady requested, pointed out the place where the receipt would be found.  He also begged the deceased to appear to his wife, and the latter saw her husband in a dream, wrapped in a dressing-gown which he wore just before his death; and he showed her the paper in the place indicated by Swedenborg, where it had been securely put away.  At another time, embarking from London in a vessel commanded by Captain Dixon, he overheard a lady asking if there were plenty of provisions on board.  ‘We do not want a great quantity,’ he said; ’in eight days and two hours we shall reach Stockholm,’—­which actually happened.  This peculiar state of vision as to the things of the earth—­into which Swedenborg could put himself at will, and which astonished those about him—­was, nevertheless, but a feeble representative of his faculty of looking into heaven.

“Not the least remarkable of his published visions is that in which he relates his journeys through the Astral Regions; his descriptions cannot fail to astonish the reader, partly through the crudity of their details.  A man whose scientific eminence is incontestable, and who united in his own person powers of conception, will, and imagination, would surely have invented better if he had invented at all.  The fantastic literature of the East offers nothing that can give an idea of this astounding work, full of the essence of poetry, if it is permissible to compare a work of faith with one of oriental fancy.  The transportation of Swedenborg by the Angel who served as guide to this first journey is told with a sublimity which exceeds, by the distance which God has placed betwixt the earth and the sun, the great epics of Klopstock, Milton, Tasso, and Dante.  This description, which serves in fact as an introduction to his work on the Astral Regions, has never been published; it is among the oral traditions left by Swedenborg to the three disciples who were nearest to his heart.  Monsieur Silverichm has written them down.  Monsieur Seraphitus endeavored more than once to talk to me about them; but the recollection of his cousin’s words was so burning a memory that he always stopped short at the first sentence and became lost in a revery from which I could not rouse him.”