He accomplished his object.  Through burning homes and bleeding hearts and crushed hopes he marched to his renown.  The forces of the empire were allied with Denmark and Poland against him.  With skill and energy which can hardly find a parallel in the tales of romance, he baffled all the combinations of his foes.  Energy is a noble quality, and we may admire its exhibition even though we detest the cause which has called it forth.  The Swedish fleet had been sunk by the Danes, and Charles Gustavus was driven from the waters of the Baltic.  With a few transports he secretly conveyed an army across the Cattegat to the northern coast of Jutland, marched rapidly down those inhospitable shores until he came to the narrow strait, called the Little Belt, which separates Jutland from the large island of Fyen.  He crossed this strait on the ice, dispersed a corps of Danes posted to arrest him, traversed the island, exposed to all the storms of mid-winter, some sixty miles to its eastern shore.  A series of islands, with intervening straits clogged with ice, bridged by a long and circuitous way his passage across the Great Belt.  A march of ten miles across the hummocks, rising and falling with the tides, landed him upon the almost pathless snows of Langeland.  Crossing that dreary waste diagonally some dozen miles to another arm of the sea ten miles wide, which the ices of a winter of almost unprecedented severity had also bridged, pushing boldly on, with a recklessness which nothing but success redeems from stupendous infatuation, he crossed this fragile surface, which any storm might crumble beneath his feet, and landed upon the western coast of Laaland.  A march of thirty-five miles over a treeless, shelterless and almost uninhabited expanse, brought him to the eastern shore.  Easily crossing a narrow strait about a mile in width, he plunged into the forests of the island of Falster.  A dreary march of twenty-seven miles conducted him to the last remaining arm of the sea which separated him from Zealand.  This strait, from twelve to fifteen miles in breadth, was also closed by ice.  Charles Gustavus led his hardy soldiers across it, and then, with accelerated steps, pressed on some sixty miles to Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark.  In sixteen days after landing in Jutland, his troops were encamped in Zealand before the gates of the capital.

The King of Denmark was appalled at such a sudden apparition.  His allies were too remote to render him any assistance.  Never dreaming of such an attack, his capital was quite defenseless in that quarter.  Overwhelmed with terror and despondency, he was compelled to submit to such terms as the conqueror might dictate.  The conqueror was inexorable in his demands.  Sweden was aggrandized, and Denmark humiliated.

Leopold was greatly chagrined by this sudden prostration of his faithful ally.  In the midst of these scenes of ambition and of conquest, the “king of terrors” came with his summons to Charles Gustavus.  The passage of this blood-stained warrior to the world of spirits reminds us of the sublime vision of Isaiah when the King of Babylon sank into the grave: