rits or angels held converse with him as with
Swedenborg. It is needless to dwell, in the way either of acceptance or
rejection, on the very few occasions in which his outward life seemed to
him to come into contact with the invisible world. The apparition of the
pail of gold to the herd boy on the Landskrone, the visit of the
mysterious stranger to the young apprentice, the fascination of the
luminous sheen, reflected from a common pewter dish, which first, in
1600, gave an intuitive turn to his meditations, the heavenly music
which filled his ears as he lay dying--none of these matters is
connected organically with the secret of his special power. The
mysteries of which he discoursed were not reported to him: he "beheld"
them. He saw the root of all mysteries, the _Ungrund_ or _Urgrund_,
whence issue all contrasts and discordant principles, hardness and
softness, severity and mildness, sweet and bitter, love and sorrow,
heaven and hell. These he "saw" in their origin; these he attempted to
describe in their issue, and to reconcile in their eternal result. He
saw into the being of God; whence the birth or going forth of the divine
manifestation. Nature lay unveiled to him, he was at home in the heart
of things. "His own book, which he himself was," the microcosm of man,
with his threefold life, was patent to his vision. Such was his own
account of his qualification. If he failed it was in expression; he
confessed himself a poor mouthpiece, though he saw with a sure spiritual
eye.

It must not be supposed that the form in which Boehme's pneumatic
realism worked itself out in detail was shaped entirely from within. In
his writings we trace the influence of Theophr. Bombast von Hohenheim,
known as Paracelsus (1493-1541), of Kaspar Schwenkfeld (1490-1561), the
first Protestant mystic, and of Valentin Weigel (1533-1588). From the
school of Paracelsus came much of his puzzling phraseology,--his _Turba_
and _Tinctur_ and so forth,--a phraseology embarrassing to himself as
well as to his readers. His friends plied him with foreign terms, which
he was delighted to receive, interpreting them by an instinct, and using
them often in a corrupted form and always in a sense of his own. Thus
the word _Idea_ called up before him the image of "a very fair,
heavenly, and chaste virgin." The title _Aurora_, by which his earliest
treatise is best known, was furnished by Dr Balthasar Walther. These,
however, were false helps, which only ser