Soon after this he gave up his chemical experiments and took up alchemy, with a conviction, almost pathetic in its intensity, that he would succeed in making gold. Although his dramas had already been performed in Paris, a success which had fallen to the lot of no other Swedish dramatist, he forgot all his successes as an author, and devoted himself solely to this new pursuit, to meet again with disappointment. On March 29, 1897, he began the study of Swedenborg, the Northern Seer. A feeling of home-sickness after heaven laid hold of him, and he began to believe that he was being prepared for a higher existence. "I despise the earth," he writes, "this unclean world, these men and their works. I seem to myself a righteous man, like Job, whom the Eternal is putting to the test, and whom the purgatorial fires of this world will soon make worthy of a speedy deliverance." More and more he seemed to approach Catholicism. One day he, the former socialist and atheist, bought a rosary. "It is pretty," he said, "and the evil spirits fear the cross." At the same time, it must be confessed that this transition to the Christian point of view did not subdue his egotism and independence of character. "It is my duty," he said, "to fight for the maintenance of my ego against all influences which a sect or party, from love of proselytising, might bring to bear upon it. The conscience, which the grace of my Divine protector has given me, tells me that." And then comes a sentence full of joy and sorrow alike, which seems to obliterate his whole past. "Born with a home-sick longing after heaven, as a child I wept over the squalor of existence and felt myself strange and homeless among men. From childhood upwards I have looked for God and found the Devil." He becomes actually humble, and recognises that God, on account of his pride, his conceit, his ὕβρις, had sent him for a time to hell. "Happy is he whom God punishes." The return to Christ is complete. All his faith, all his hope now rest solely on the Crucified, whom he had once demoniacally hated.