hought. He unlocks our chains and admits us to a
new scene.

This emancipation is dear to all men, and the power to impart it, as
it must come from greater depth and scope of thought, is a measure of
intellect. Therefore all books of the imagination endure, all which
ascend to that truth that the writer sees nature beneath him, and uses
it as his exponent. Every verse or sentence possessing this virtue will
take care of its own immortality. The religions of the world are the
ejaculations of a few imaginative men.

But the quality of the imagination is to flow, and not to freeze. The
poet did not stop at the color or the form, but read their meaning;
neither may he rest in this meaning, but he makes the same objects
exponents of his new thought. Here is the difference betwixt the poet
and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a
true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false. For all symbols
are fluxional; all language is vehicular and transitive, and is good, as
ferries and horses are, for conveyance, not as farms and houses are,
for homestead. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and
individual symbol for an universal one. The morning-redness happens to
be the favorite meteor to the eyes of Jacob Behmen, and comes to stand
to him for truth and faith; and, he believes, should stand for the same
realities to every reader. But the first reader prefers as naturally the
symbol of a mother and child, or a gardener and his bulb, or a jeweller
polishing a gem. Either of these, or of a myriad more, are equally
good to the person to whom they are significant. Only they must be held
lightly, and be very willingly translated into the equivalent terms
which others use. And the mystic must be steadily told,--All that you
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 i