C. A. Tulk and Flaxman, were devoted Swedenborgians, and he told Tulk

that he had two different states, one in which he liked Swedenborg's writings, and one in which he disliked them. Unquestionably, they sometimes irritated him, and then he abused them, but it is only necessary to read his annotations of his copy of Swedenborg's _Wisdom of the Angels_ (now in the British Museum) to realise in the first place that he sometimes misunderstood Swedenborg's position and secondly, that when he did understand it, he was thoroughly in agreement with it, and that he and the Swedish seer had much in common. Coleridge admired Swedenborg, he gave a good deal of time to studying him (see Coleridge's letter to C. A. Tulk, July 17, 1820), and he, with Boehme, were two of the four "Great Men" unjustly branded, about whom he often thought of writing a "Vindication" (Coleridge's Notes on Noble's Appeal, _Collected Works_, ed. Shedd, 1853 and 1884, vol. v. p. 526). Emerson owes much to Swedenborg,[7] and Emerson's thought had much influence in England. Carlyle also was attracted to him (see his letter from Chelsea, November 13, 1852); Mrs Browning studied him with enthusiasm and spent the winter of 1852-3 in meditation on his philosophy (_Letters_, vol. 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. In addition to those writers which are here dealt with in detail, there is much of the mystic spirit in others of the same period, to name a few only, George Meredith, "Fiona Macleod," Christina Rossetti, and Mrs Browning; while to-day writers like "A. E.," W. B. Yeats, and Evelyn Underhill are carrying on the mystic tradition.