I did not count them, but I am told that there are over twelve hundred guns and eight hundred swords and daggers, most of them the relics of this war. An immense library, a splendid collection of old manuscripts, rare pictures, and porcelain make the palace far more interesting than most museums. There is one treasure which I have since read about and which I am very sorry I did not see. It is a little gold ring containing a ruby set in diamonds. “This is the ring the great Gustavus Adolphus gave to his first and only true love, the beautiful and gifted Ebba Brahe, on their betrothal. The diamond ring that Ebba gave to Gustavus in return is preserved in the sacristy of the cathedral at Upsala.”
Five of the love letters of Gustavus are still preserved, and no lover ever wrote more ardently or charmingly. But the course of true love is not any more likely to run smoothly with princes than with other people. Indeed I am not sure but the average man has a decided advantage over a prince in that respect. For though Gustavus and Ebba were betrothed, they were never allowed to marry. The old queen would not allow Gustavus to have a Swedish subject for his wife, but made him marry a German princess with few brains and small personal attractions compared with Ebba Brahe, while Ebba married a Swedish Field Marshal. This accounts for the fact that her engagement ring is treasured at Skokloster to-day, for the son-in-law of Field Marshal Wrangel belonged to the Brahe family, in whose possession it has remained ever since.
Does not this little romance seem to bring the great warrior a little nearer to us? As we think of that little ruby ring, he is no longer a demigod, but a disappointed lover, a lovelorn wooer, “sighing like a furnace”; thinking, no doubt, unutterable things about the stern old queen who would not let him have his own way.
It gives us a glimpse, too, of the influence of woman in those old days. Even the most advanced suffragette of the present time cannot make a British Prime Minister bend to her will, while one woman in the olden days was enough to make the greatest warrior of Christendom quail and give up the one on whom he had set his heart’s affection.
But if Skokloster detains us too long, I shall not be able to bring you to Upsala to-day. A few hours after leaving Skokloster, we enter the little Fyris River, which winds through a wide plain and takes us close to the heart of Sweden’s most famous university town.
One can tell that he is in a college town before the boat ties up at the wharf, for students in white caps have come down to the wharf to meet other students in white caps, who are coming back to their college duties. There are two thousand of them here, and nearly one hundred and fifty professors and instructors. A beautiful name has been given to Upsala by someone who calls it the “City of Eternal Youth.” A happy name indeed for any college town, where every six or eight years the student body wholly changes, and with every year new blood and young life is injected into the veins of the old institution.
Some educationalists think that our college course in America is too long, and that young men are consequently obliged to begin their life work too late. What would they say to Upsala, I wonder, where the course is from six to ten years, though the average age of entering is nineteen. Philosophy, law, and theology exact six years of study on the average, before the examinations can be successfully passed, while medicine requires eight or ten. Surely the doctors of Sweden should be well equipped for their life work.
Another unique feature of Upsala University is the institution of the “Nations.” These Nations are something like the Greek-letter societies of American colleges, with the important distinction that every student at Upsala must join one of the Thirteen Nations, and there is none of the snobbishness which is beginning to characterize some of our Greek-letter societies.
These Thirteen Nations all have buildings or rooms of their own, and each one is named after one of the provinces of Sweden, while a distinctive flag waving over the building shows what Nation inhabits it. The chief university building is worthy of any institution on either side of the Atlantic, but there is no great group of buildings or splendid quadrangle, and the first effect of Upsala as a university town is rather meager and disappointing. A homely brick building with a round tower at either end was formerly a royal palace, but is now used by the university.
Gustavus Adolphus, who had a hand in almost everything of importance in ancient Sweden, gave the university a splendid endowment, and sent back to it from his battlefields many of the spoils of war, among others a great library from Wurzburg, Germany. It is said that at the same time he forwarded the Twelve Apostles in silver and the golden Virgin Mary from the Wurzburg cathedral to the Swedish mint to be coined into kroner. He doubtless felt, like his great English prototype, Cromwell, that the apostles should “go about doing good.”