ii. p. 141), which bore fruit four years
later in _Aurora Leigh_.
Coventry Patmore is, however, the English writer most saturated with
Swedenborg's thought, and his _Angel in the House_ embodies the main
features of Swedenborg's peculiar views expressed in _Conjugial Love_,
on sex and marriage and their significance. It is not too much to say
that Swedenborg influenced and coloured the whole trend of Patmore's
thought, and that he was to him what Boehme was to Law, the match which
set alight his mystical flame. He says Swedenborg's _Heaven and Hell_
"abounds with perception of the truth to a degree unparalleled perhaps
in uninspired writing," and he asserts that he never tires of reading
him, "he is unfathomably profound and yet simple."[8]
Whatever may be the source or reason, it is clear that at the end of the
eighteenth century we begin to find a mystical tinge of thought in
several thinkers and writers, such as Burke, Coleridge, and Thomas
Erskine of Linlathen. This increases in the early nineteenth century,
strengthened by the influence, direct and indirect, of Boehme,
Swedenborg, and the German transcendental philosophers and this mystical
spirit is very marked in Carlyle, and, as we shall see, in most of the
greatest nineteenth-century poets.
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