His silver-gilt shrine is still the chief treasure of the noble cathedral that rose between Trinity Church and St. Eric's Spring when the archbishopric was moved from the old Upsala to the new. This great church would dominate a much larger town, for its twin spires rise but little short of four hundred feet. It was designed by one of the builders of Notre Dame, Etienne de Bonneuil, who by a document written in Paris on September 8, 1287, was appointed master builder of Sweden's new metropolitan church. By students from Scandinavia at the French capital the cathedral rising by the Seine was so much admired that they got it arranged that a "tailleur de pierre" from its works should reproduce its glories among the forests of the North. It is thus no surprise to find the plan of Upsala Cathedral reproducing that of Notre Dame, though much simplified and on a scale considerably reduced.[109] The superficial resemblance is by no means close, for the materials available were only brick with stone for necessary detail work, which had to be sparingly used.
The great rose windows, west and north, the clustered piers and moulded arches, the plainly ribbed vaulting and indeed the general effect of the interior remind one of the fairest contemporary churches of France, but the blind storey (or triforium), pierced only by meaningless little circles, does nothing to recall the beautiful arcades that open to the galleries of Notre Dame, while the plain pinnacles and flying buttresses without are destitute of any substitutes for the world-famed devils that look down on the Paris streets.
The oldest monument is a brass memorial to Birger Persson, who was president of the Royal Commission which codified the laws of Upland in 1296. One of the children figured afterwards became the illustrious St. Birgitta, or Brita, who, after the death of her husband Ulf, visited Jerusalem, received revelations, founded an order for monks and nuns, and took a prominent part in Church affairs at Rome, trying to get the pope back from Avignon. Her revelations, or some of them, have been printed, but, if one may judge by the samples read by Bishop Wordsworth,[110] they are somewhat sorry stuff, not superior to the sermons of an average curate and not to be compared with the revelations of St. Julian of Norwich.
The rules of her order were revealed to her (so she firmly believed) by Christ, and approved by the pope. There was a house in England (the priory of Syon), while the principal convent of the Order of the Holy Saviour, as it was called, stood on Lake Vettern at Vadstena; its buildings to-day form a refuge for the mad. In the church the relics of the foundress are still reverently preserved, for Charles XII. refused to sell them to the pope. "First and foremost," he remarked, "no one can say for certain if they be her bones or not; secondly, in no wise would I be a party to the encouragement of idle superstition; and thirdly I am not a dealer in old bones."
In 1590 papal envoys had purchased the relics of another Swedish saint named David, who hung his gloves on sunbeams, and the church at Munketorp was built with the price they paid; but the priest who effected the sale boasted at a synod that he had only given up the first skeleton that he found in the vaults of the church.
St. Brita has taken a strong hold on popular imagination in Sweden and figures largely in the folklore of the land. Her peculiar sanctity it is said enabled her to see the devil, until one day she failed to control her laughter when in church she saw him bump his head against a pillar. He was trying to stretch a goat's skin with his teeth, for as it was the vellum was far too small to hold the names of those that he noticed nodding as the sermon wore. The local colour of this tale seems distinctly later than the fourteenth century, when St. Brita was alive.
In the Lady Chapel of the cathedral is a fine monument to Gustaf Vasa with effigies in English alabaster of the king and two wives. The walls are painted with some of the events of his adventurous life.[111]
Restored to his birth-land in 1908 and deposited in this cathedral after original burial in England during 1772, are the bones of one of the strangest characters that Sweden ever produced, Emanuel Swedenborg. Son of a distinguished bishop, he early made a name as a scientist and his achievements were of no mean kind. He anticipated modern knowledge as to the planets of the solar system flying off from the mass of the sun and developing their own orbits and rotations. In England he knew Newton, Halley and Flamsteed, and on the Continent also he met the chief men of science of his day. Great practical assistance in the engineering line he was able to afford to Charles XII., including help in the construction of docks at Karlskrona (p. [164]), and the transport of ships overland in the war against Norway in 1718. During the latter part of his life Swedenborg had visions and founded in London the Society of the New Church signified by the New Jerusalem, his ideas being much influenced by Gnosticism. How far he was qualified as a religious teacher is of course a matter of opinion. Emerson says that he is "disagreeably wise, and with all his accumulated gifts paralyses and repels."
Few spots of Europe surpass in interest these simple and unornamented monuments of all the ages of the northern world: earth mounds told of in saga story, cathedral carrying the loveliest style of central Europe to the far North, castle where kings dwelt of old, university that has influenced the thought of all mankind. Though the capital is moved to the outlet of the lake, where there rises a yet fairer town, this plain is the true centre of Swedish story from earliest to latest days.
As Tegnér's Drapa, Englished by Longfellow expresses it: