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quality, and naturally circuitous. It is ringing frost to-day, and for
days back:--Friedrich Wilhelm hastily gathers all the sledges, all
the horses of the district; mounts some four thousand men in sledges;
starts, with the speed of light, in that fashion. Scours along all
day, and after the intervening bit of land, again along; awakening
the ice-bound silences. Gloomy Frische Haf, wrapt in its Winter
cloud-coverlids, with its wastes of tumbled sand, its poor frost-bound
fishing-hamlets, pine-hillocks,--desolate-looking, stern as Greenland or
more so, says Busching, who travelled there in winter-time, [Busching's
_Beitrage_ (Halle, 1789), vi. 160.]--hears unexpected human noises,
and huge grinding and trampling; the four thousand, in long fleet
of sledges, scouring across it, in that manner. All day they rush
along,--out of the rimy hazes of morning into the olive-colored clouds
of evening again,--with huge loud-grinding rumble;--and do arrive in
time at Gilge. A notable streak of things, shooting across those frozen
solitudes, in the New-Year, 1679;--little short of Karl Gustav's feat,
which we heard of, in the other or Danish end of the Baltic, twenty
years ago, when he took Islands without ships.

This Second Exploit--suggested or not by that prior one of Karl Gustav
on the ice--is still a thing to be remembered by Hohenzollerns and
Prussians. The Swedes were beaten here, on Friedrich Wilhelm's rapid
arrival; were driven into disastrous rapid retreat Northward; which they
executed, in hunger and cold; fighting continually, like Northern bears,
under the grim sky; Friedrich Wilhelm sticking to their skirts,--holding
by their tail, like an angry bear-ward with steel whip in his hand. A
thing which, on the small scale, reminds one of Napoleon's experiences.
Not till Napoleon's huge fighting-flight, a hundred and thirty-four
years after, did I read of such a transaction in those parts. The
Swedish invasion of Preussen has gone utterly to ruin.

And this, then, is the end of Sweden, and its bad neighborhood on these
shores, where it has tyrannously sat on our skirts so long? Swedish
Pommern the Elector already had: last year, coming towards it ever since
the Exploit of Fehrbellin, he had invaded Swedish Pommern; had
besieged and taken Stettin, nay Stralsund too, where Wallenstein had
failed;--cleared Pommern altogether of its Swedish guests. Who had tried
next in Preussen, with what luck we see. Of Swedish Pommern th