Every year on the sixth of November a great procession of Swedes with bands and banners, led by the famous choral societies of Stockholm, proceeds through the streets on a triumphal march to the Church of the Knights, where the great king lies buried, a spot forever sacred to the lovers of freedom.
In the king’s park in Stockholm we find another interesting statue, that of Charles XII. He stands with his sword in one hand pointing with powerful finger to the Baltic, on whose shores he gained his greatest victories.
As I gazed at the noble statue, I thought how this great-grandson of Gustavus Vasa came to the throne as a boy of fifteen years of age. How three years after, Russia, with Peter the Great for her emperor; Poland, then the great power of central Europe; Saxony and Denmark all united their forces to crush this eighteen-year-old king and the country for which he fought so bravely. But he was equal to them all. One after another he conquered Denmark, Prussia, and Poland in the field, and for nine years with Sweden, a little nation of only two and a half millions of people at his back, he held them all at bay.
“With an army of eight hundred half-starved, half-frozen Swedes on a chill November morning he charged upon forty thousand Russians behind intrenchments at Narva and put them to utter rout, taking in prisoners alone more than double his little army.”
Many were his vicissitudes; defeated after nine years of victory by the Russians at Pultava, he had to flee to Turkey, hoping to enlist the sympathies of the Sultan against the Russians. For five years he remained there in exile, and then, almost alone, in an incredibly short space of time, made his way across Europe, and for years more fought the battles of Sweden against mighty odds, but with indomitable courage and often with success, until a bullet at the battle of Fredrikshald in Norway put an end to this heroic life and at the same time closed the era of Sweden’s greatness.
I cannot take you to all the statues of Stockholm to-day, Judicia, but there are two others which I think we must visit. As a lover of flowers you would never forgive me if we did not together make our obeisance before the monument of Linnæus. It is true that he is associated more particularly with Upsala and its university, where I hope later to see his grave, but he has a worthy statue in Stockholm in the Humlegård. There he stands in a benignant attitude that befits a great naturalist. I am glad that he is surrounded by the trees and plants and flowers that he loved so well and did so much to make us familiar with.
When a man is preëminently distinguished in one line, his services to the world in other directions are apt to be overlooked. Linnæus was not only a great botanist, but a distinguished physician and a brilliant writer on geographical subjects. He traveled much throughout Sweden, and our knowledge of Swedish life in the eighteenth century is largely due to his interesting and accurate accounts of his travels. He is said also to have created a new style of Swedish prose, and to have been as eminent as a teacher as he was as an investigator.
You would hardly recognize him under his Swedish name, Carolus a Ljnné, or Carl von Linné, as he is more commonly called. Linné was the most prominent lecturer of his time, we are told. “When he took a ramble, discoursing as he went and ‘demonstrating Flora’s charming children’ then Botany became the scientia amabilis, a knowledge of which was an honor for all, from royalty down to the poorest peasant.”
As I gazed at his statue, however, I could not help thinking, with a sense of mild pity, of the millions of school children with no great gifts for botanical research who have struggled over the two hard names which he set the fashion of assigning to every plant, one for the genus and one for the species; and who have studied, with many a groan, his system of identifying plants which seem to them as dry as the herbariums which they have been compelled to collect and arrange.
One other statue, among the latest erected in Stockholm, is of peculiar interest to Americans, for it commemorates the man who, more than any other inventor, saved the Union in the terribly black days of ’63. This man was Captain John Ericsson, the son of a Swedish miner, “born and brought up in a miner’s hut in the backwoods of Sweden.” On Sunday, September 14, 1890, the body of Ericsson was given over by America to the perpetual care of Sweden, his native land. It had been brought from New York in the warship Baltimore by Captain Schley, who afterwards won his laurels on the coast of Cuba.