put forward in behalf of Swedenborg as a scientific discoverer.  “Philosophers” will not be pleased to be reminded that Swedenborg called them “cockatrices,” “asps,” or “flying serpents;” “literary men” will not agree that they are “conjurers and charlatans,” and will not listen with patience to the praises of a man who so called them.  As for the poets, they can take their choice of Emerson’s poetical or prose estimate of the great Mystic, but they cannot very well accept both.  In “The Test,” the Muse says:—­

  “I hung my verses in the wind,
  Time and tide their faults may find;
  All were winnowed through and through,
  Five lines lasted good and true ... 
  Sunshine cannot bleach the snow,
  Nor time unmake what poets know. 
  Have you eyes to find the five
  Which five hundred did survive?”

In the verses which follow we learn that the five immortal poets referred to are Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Swedenborg, and Goethe.

And now, in the Essay we have just been looking at, I find that “his books have no melody, no emotion, no humor, no relief to the dead prosaic level.  We wander forlorn in a lack-lustre landscape.  No bird ever sang in these gardens of the dead.  The entire want of poetry in so transcendent a mind betokens the disease, and like a hoarse voice in a beautiful person, is a kind of warning.”  Yet Emerson says of him that “He lived to purpose:  he gave a verdict.  He elected goodness as the clue to which the soul must cling in this labyrinth of nature.”

Emerson seems to have admired Swedenborg at a distance, but seen nearer, he liked Jacob Behmen a great deal better.

“Montaigne; or, the Skeptic,” is easier reading than the last-mentioned Essay.  Emerson accounts for the personal regard which he has for Montaigne by the story of his first acquaintance with him.  But no other reason was needed than that Montaigne was just what Emerson describes him as being.

“There have been men with deeper insight; but, one would say, never a man with such abundance of thought:  he is never dull, never insincere, and has the genius to make the reader care for all that he cares for.

“The sincerity and marrow of the man reaches to his sentences.  I know not anywhere the book that seems less written.  It is the language of conversation transferred to a book.  Cut these words and they would bleed; they are vascular and alive.—­

“Montaigne talks with shrewdness, knows the world and books and himself, and uses the positive degree; never shrieks, or protests, or prays:  no weakness, no convulsion, no superlative:  does not wish to jump out of his skin, or play any antics, or annihilate space or time, but is stout and solid; tastes every moment of the day; likes pain because it makes him feel himself and realize things; as we pinch ourselves to know that we are awake.  He keeps the plain; he rarely