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 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.