delightful collection of lyrical poems, 'Nightingvale Valley (1860), in which (at last) occur a specimen or two of Blake's verse. The coincidence is not a trivial one. Of all modern men, the engraver's apprentice [Blake] was to grow up the likest to Emanuel Swedenborg; already by constitutional endowment and temperament was so; in faculty for theosophic dreaming, for the seeing of visions while broad awake, and in matter-of-fact hold of spiritual things. To savan and to artist alike, while yet on earth, the heavens were opened. By Swedenborg's theological writings, the first English editions of which appeared during Blake's manhood, the latter was considerably influenced, but in no slavish spirit. These writings, in common with those of Jacob Boehmen, and of the other select mystics of the world, had natural affinities to Blake's mind, and were eagerly assimilated. But he hardly became a proselyte or 'Swedenborgian' proper [hardly!), though his friend Flaxman did."
Now let us see what Blake writes of Swedenborg, to whom he was "the likest of all modern men." When thirty-three he brought forth an engraved volume, illustrated in colour, of which Mr. Swinburne thus speaks ("William Blake: A Critical Essay," 1868, p. 204):—
