Country then as now called PREUSSEN (Prussia Proper), inhabited
by Heathens, where also endeavors at conversion are-going on,
though without success hitherto. Upon which we are now called to
cast a glance.

It is a moory flat country, full of lakes and woods, like
Brandenburg; spreading out into grassy expanses, and bosky
wildernesses humming with bees; plenty of bog in it, but plenty
also of alluvial mud; sand too, but by no means so high a ratio of
it as in Brandenburg; tracts of Preussen are luxuriantly grassy,
frugiferous, apt for the plough; and the soil generally is
reckoned fertile, though lying so far northward. Part of the great
plain or flat which stretches, sloping insensibly, continuously,
in vast expanse, from the Silesian Mountains to the amber-regions
of the Baltic; Preussen is the seaward, more alluvial part of
this,--extending west and east, on both sides of the Weichsel
(VISTULA), from the regions of the Oder river to the main stream
of the Memel. BORDERING-ON-RUSSIA its name signifies: BOR-RUSSIA,
B'russia, Prussia; or --some say it was only on a certain
inconsiderable river in those parts, river REUSSEN, that it
"bordered" and not on the great Country, or any part of it,
which now in our days is conspicuously its next neighbor.
Who knows?--

In Henry the Fowler's time, and long afterwards, Preussen was a
vehemently Heathen country; the natives a Miscellany of rough
Serbic Wends, Letts, Swedish Goths, or Dryasdust knows not what;--
very probably a sprinkling of Swedish Goths, from old time,
chiefly along the coasts. Dryasdust khows only that these PREUSSEN
were a strong-boned, iracund herdsman-and-fisher people; highly