Traces of Boehme's influence appear in the terms and {234} ideas of many English writers during the period under consideration, besides those specifically mentioned. Sir Isaac Newton read Boehme's books with great appreciation and meditated upon those strange accounts of the invisible universe which underlies and is in the visible world, but we need not take too seriously the claim of the "Behmenists" that "he was ploughing with Behmen's heifer" when he discovered the law of universal gravitation![76] Milton, without any doubt, had read the German mystic's account of the eternal war between the Light Principle and the Dark Principle, of the fall of Lucifer, of the loss of Paradise, and of the return of man in Christ to Paradise, and there are many passages in the great poet which look decidedly like germinations from the seed which Boehme sowed, but we must observe caution in tracing the origin of verses written by a poet of Milton's genius and originality and range of knowledge. One great Englishman of a later period, William Law, unmistakably owed to Jacob Boehme the main influences which transformed his life, and through the pure and lucid style of this noble English mystic of the eighteenth century, Boehme's insights found a new interpretation and a clearer expression than he himself or any other interpreter had been able to give them.[77] [1] "The Life of one Jacob Boehmen, who although he was a meane man, yet wrote the most wonderful deepe knowledge in Naturall and Divine Things, that any hath been known to doe since the Apostles' Times, and yet never read them or learned them from any other man, as may be scene in that which followeth."--London, 1644, printed by L. N. for Richard Whitaker. [2] _Journal of George Fox_ (Cambridge edition, 1911), i. p. 18. [3] Preface, A. 4. [4] _Ibid._ [5] _Journ._ i. p. 29. [6] _The Life of Jacob Behmen_, written by Durant Hotham, Esquire, November 7, 1653. Printed for H. Blunden, and sold at the Castle in Corn Hill, 1654. [7] _Life of Jacob Behmen_, B. 2. [8] _Op. cit._ B. 2.