The writings of John Greenleaf Whittier, Volume 7.
John Greenleaf Whittier, Ed.

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[278] the science, he has given to the world, in the simplest and most natural language, a series of speculations upon the great mystery of being: detailed, matter-of-fact narratives of revelations from the spiritual world, which at once appall us by their boldness, and excite our wonder at their extraordinary method, logical accuracy, and perfect consistency. These remarkable speculations—the workings of a mind in which a powerful imagination allied itself with superior reasoning faculties, the marvellous current of whose thought ran only in the diked and guarded channels of mathematical demonstration—he uniformly speaks of as ‘facts.’ His perceptions of abstractions were so intense that they seem to have reached that point where thought became sensible to sight as well as feeling. What he thought, that he saw.

He relates his visions of the spiritual world as he would the incidents of a walk round his own city of Stockholm. One can almost see him in his ‘brown coat and velvet breeches,’ lifting his ‘cocked hat’ to an angel, or keeping an unsavory spirit at arm's length with that ‘gold-headed cane’ which his London host describes as his inseparable companion in walking. His graphic descriptions have always an air of naturalness and probability; yet there is a minuteness of detail at times almost bordering on the ludicrous. In his Memorable Relations he manifests nothing of the imagination of Milton, overlooking the closed gates of paradise, or following the ‘pained fiend’ in his flight through chaos; nothing of Dante's terrible imagery appalls us; we are led on from heaven to