History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 2 | Page 7

Brandenburg; spreading out into grassy expanses, and bosky wildernesses humming with bees; plenty of bog in it, but plenty also of alluvial mud; sand too, but by no means so high a ratio of it as in Brandenburg; tracts of Preussen are luxuriantly grassy, frugiferous, apt for the plough; and the soil generally is reckoned fertile, though lying so far northward. Part of the great plain or flat which stretches, sloping insensibly, continuously, in vast expanse, from the Silesian Mountains to the amber-regions of the Baltic; Preussen is the seaward, more alluvial part of this,--extending west and east, on both sides of the Weichsel (VISTULA), from the regions of the Oder river to the main stream of the Memel. BORDERING-ON-RUSSIA its name signifies: BOR-RUSSIA, B'russia, Prussia; or --some say it was only on a certain inconsiderable river in those parts, river REUSSEN, that it "bordered" and not on the great Country, or any part of it, which now in our days is conspicuously its next neighbor. Who knows?--
In Henry the Fowler's time, and long afterwards, Preussen was a vehemently Heathen country; the natives a Miscellany of rough Serbic Wends, Letts, Swedish Goths, or Dryasdust knows not what;-- very probably a sprinkling of Swedish Goths, from old time, chiefly along the coasts. Dryasdust khows only that these PREUSSEN were a strong-boned, iracund herdsman-and-fisher people; highly averse to be interfered with, in their religion especially. Famous otherwise, through all the centuries, for the AMBER they had been used to fish, and sell in foreign parts.
Amber, science declares, is a kind of petrified resin, distilled by pines that were dead before the days of Adam; which is now thrown up, in stormy weather, on that remote coast, and is there fished out by the amphibious people,--who can likewise get it by running mine-shafts into the sandhills on their coast;--by whom it is sold into the uttermost parts of the Earth, Arabia and beyond, from a very early period of time. No doubt Pytheas had his eye upon this valuable product, when he ventured into survey of those regions,--which are still the great mother of amber in our world. By their amber-fishery, with the aid of dairy-produce and plenty of beef and leather, these Heathen Preussen, of uncertain miscellaneous breed, contrived to support existence in a substantial manner; they figure to us as an inarticulate, heavy- footed, rather iracund people. Their knowledge of Christianity was trifling, their aversion to knowing anything of it was great.
As Poland, and the neighbors to the south, were already Christian, and even the Bohemian Czechs were mostly Converted, pious wishes as to Preussen, we may fancy, were a constant feeling: but no effort hitherto, if efforts were made, had come to anything. Let some daring missionary go to preach in that country, his reception is of the worst, or perhaps he is met ou the frontier with menaces, and forbidden to preach at all; except sorrow and lost labor, nothing has yet proved attainable. It was very dangerous to go;--and with what likelihood of speeding? Efforts, we may suppose, are rare; but the pious wish being continual and universal, efforts can never altogether cease. From Henry the Fowler's capture of Brannibor, count seventy years, we find Henry's great-grandson reigning as Elective Kaiser,--Otto III., last of the direct "Saxon Kaisers," Otto Wonder of the World;--and alongside of Otto's great transactions, which were onoe called MIRABILIA MUNDI and are now fallen so extinct, there is the following small transaction, a new attempt to preach in Preussen, going on, which, contrariwise, is still worth taking notice of.
About the year 997 or 996, Adalbert, Bishop of Prag, a very zealous, most devout man, but evidently of hot temper, and liable to get into quarrels, had determined, after many painful experiences of the perverse ungovernable nature of corrupt mankind, to give up his nominally Christian flock altogether; to shake the dust off his feet against Prag, and devote himself to converting those Prussian Heathen, who, across the frontiers, were living in such savagery, and express bondage to the Devil, worshipping mere stocks and stones. In this enterprise he was encouraged by the Christian potentates who lay contiguous; especially by the Duke of Poland, to whom such next-neighbors, for all reasons, were an eye-sorrow.
Adalbert went, accordingly, with staff and scrip, two monks attending him, into that dangerous country: not in fear, he; a devout high-tempered man, verging now on fifty, his hair getting gray, and face marred with innumerable troubles and provocations of past time. He preached zealously, almost fiercely,--though chiefly with his eyes and gestures, I should think, having no command of the language. At Dantzig, among the Swedish-Goth kind of Heathen, he had some success, or affluence of attendance; not elsewhere that we hear of. In the Pillau region, for example, where he