is wisest maxims. Shakespeare dearly
loved a fool, because he was one. He plays with truth as a kitten
gambols with a ball of yarn.

So Emerson would have us reconcile the holy zeal for truth and the swish
of this bright blade of the intellect. He himself confesses that after
reading Swedenborg he turns to Shakespeare and reads "As You Like It"
with positive delight, because Shakespeare isn't trying to prove
anything. The monks of the olden time read Rabelais and Saint Augustine
with equal relish.

Possibly we take these great men too seriously--literature is only
incidental, and what any man says about anything matters little, except
to himself. No book is of much importance; the vital thing is: What do
you yourself think?

When we read Shakespeare in a parlor class there are many things we read
over rapidly--the teacher does not stop to discuss them. The remarks of
Ophelia or the shepherd talk of Corin are indecent only when you stop
and linger over them; it will not do to sculpture such things--let them
forever remain in gaseous form. When George Francis Train picked out
certain parts of the Bible and printed them, and was arrested for
publishing obscene literature, the charge was proper and right. There
are things that need not to be emphasized--they may all be a part of
life, but in books they should be slurred over as representing simply a
passing glimpse of nature.

And so the earnest and minute arguments of Swedenborg need not give us
headache in efforts to comprehend them. They were written for himself,
as a scaffolding for his imagination. Don't take Jonathan Edwards too
seriously--he means well, but we know more. We know we do not know
anything, and he never got that far.

The bracketing of the names of Shakespeare and Swedenborg is eminently
well. They are Titans both. In the presence of such giants, small men
seem to wither and blow away. Swedenborg was cast in heroic mold, and no
other man since history began ever compassed in himself so much physical
science, and with it all on his back, made such daring voyages into the
clouds.

The men who soar highest and know most about another world usually know
little about this. No man of his time was so competent a scientist as
Swedenborg, and no man before or since has mapped so minutely the
Heavenly Kingdom.

Shakespeare's feet were really never off the ground. His excursion in
"The Tempest" was only in a captured balloon. Ariel and Caliban he
secured