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 knows 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 on 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 once called MIRABILIA MUNDI and are now fallen so extinct, there
is the following small transaction, a new attempt to preach