History of Friedrich II of Prussia, vol 2 | Page 8

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 next landed, an amphibious
Heathen lout hit him heavily across the shoulders with the flat of his
oar; sent the poor Preacher to the ground, face foremost, and suddenly
ended his salutary discourse for that time. However, he pressed forward,
regardless of results, preaching the Evangel to all creatures who were
willing or unwilling;--and pressed at last into the Sacred Circuit, the
ROMOVA, or Place of Oak-trees, and of Wooden or Stone Idols
(Bangputtis, Patkullos, and I know not what diabolic dumb Blocks),
which it was death to enter. The Heathen Priests, as we may conceive it,
rushed out; beckoned him, with loud unintelligible bullyings and fierce
gestures, to begone; hustled, shook him, shoved him, as he did not go;
then took to confused striking, struck finally a death-stroke on the head
of poor Adalbert: so that "he stretched out both his arms ('Jesus, receive
me thou!') and fell with his face to the ground, and lay dead there,--in
the form of a crucifix," say his Biographers: only the attendant monks
escaping to tell.
Attendant monks, or Adalbert, had known nothing of their being on

forbidden ground. Their accounts of the phenomenon accordingly leave
it only half explained: How he was surprised by armed Heathen
Devil's-servants in his sleep; was violently set upon, and his "beautiful
bowels ( pulchra viscera ) were run through with
seven spears:" but this of the ROMOVA, or Sacred Bangputtis Church
of Oak-trees, perhaps chief ROMOVA of the Country, rashly intruded
into, with consequent strokes, and fall in the form of a crucifix, appears
now to be the intelligible account. [Baillet, Vies des Saints
(Paris, 1739), iii. 722. Bollandus, Acta Sanetorum,
Aprilis tom. iii (DIE 23; in Edition venetiis, 1738),
pp. 174-205. Voigt, Geschichte Preussens
(Konigsberg, 1827-1839), i. 266-270.] We will take it for the real
manner of Adalbert's exit;--no doubt of the essential transaction, or that
it was a very flaming one on both sides. The date given is 23d April,
997; date famous in the Romish Calendar since.
He was a Czech by birth, son of a Heathen Bohemian man of rank: his
name (Adalbert, A'lbert, BRIGHT-in-Nobleness) he got "at Magdeburg,
whither he had gone to study" and seek baptism; where, as generally
elsewhere, his fervent devout ways were admirable to his
fellow-creatures. A "man of genius," we may well say: one of Heaven's
bright souls, born into the muddy darkness of this world;--laid hold of
by a transcendent Message, in the due transcendent degree. He entered
Prag, as Bishop, not in a carriage and six, but "walking barefoot;" his
contempt for earthly shadows being always extreme. Accordingly, his
quarrels with the SOECULUM were constant and endless; his
wanderings up and down, and vehement arguings, in this world, to little
visible effect, lasted all his days. We can perceive he was
short-tempered, thin of skin: a violently sensitive man. For example,
once in the Bohemian solitudes, on a summer afternoon, in one of his
thousand-fold pilgrimings and wayfarings, he had lain down to rest, his
one or two monks and he, in some still glade, "with a stone for his
pillow" (as was always his custom even in Prag), and had fallen sound
asleep. A Bohemian shepherd chanced to pass that way, warbling
something on his pipe, as he wended towards looking after his flock.
Seeing the sleepers on their stone pillows, the thoughtless Czech
mischievously blew louder,--started Adalbert broad awake upon him;

who, in the fury of the first moment, shrieked: "Deafness on thee! Man
cruel to the human sense of hearing!" or words to that effect. Which
curse, like the most of Adalbert's, was punctually fulfilled: the amazed
Czech stood deaf as a post, and went about so all his days after; nay, for
long centuries (perhaps down to the present time, in remote parts), no
Czech blows into his pipe in the woodlands, without certain
precautions, and preliminary fuglings of a devotional nature.
[Bollandus, ubi supra.]--From which miracle, as indeed from many
other indications, I infer an irritable nervous-system in poor Adalbert;
and find this death in the Romova was probably a furious mixture of
Earth and Heaven.
At all events, he lies there, beautiful