within the last fourteen or fifteen years; so that in this manner I am allowed to sport with serious things, and to play with the heroes and the great men of our country. But meanwhile I am affected with a certain sense of shame, when I reflect that I have said so much about my plans and ideas, and have not yet exhibited anything: my journey and its inconveniences have been the cause of this. I have now a great desire to return home to Sweden, and to take in hand all Polhammar's inventions, make drawings, and furnish descriptions of them; and also to test them by physics, mechanics, hydrostatics, and hydraulics, and likewise by algebraic calculus. I should prefer to publish them in Sweden rather than in any other place, and in this manner to make a beginning among us of a Society for Learning and Science, for which we have such an excellent foundation in Polhammar's inventions. I wish mine could serve the same purpose. . . . A thousand remembrances to my sister Anna. I hope she is not alarmed at the approach of the Russians.[1] I have a great longing to see little brother [nephew] Eric again; perhaps he will be able to make a triangle, or to draw one for me, when I give him a little ruler."
Our next date is at Greifswalde, in Pomerania, April, 1715, where Swedenborg spent some months on his mathematical and mechanical studies, "relieved with poetry;" for there he printed his Latin fables, described in the last letter. The long dalliance of Charles XII. in Turkey, after his defeat in the heart of Russia, had come to an end. Disappointed in his hopes of the Sultan's assistance against Peter the Great, he had listened to the prayers of his subjects for his return,—prayers that Swedenborg expressed in Latin verse:—
"Carole! spes Svionum! Te Musæ et Sceptra reposcunt,
Hac resonant aræ, pulpita, templa prece."[2]
From an English paraphrase of this ode, which we find in
