_Te Deum_ was sung at Vienna and Madrid, and with good reason. For Vienna and Madrid the death of Gustavus was better than any victory. For humanity, if the interests of humanity were not those of Vienna and Madrid, it was worse than any defeat. But for Gustavus himself, was it good to die glorious and stainless, but before his hour? Triumph and empire, it is said, might have corrupted the soul which up to that time had been so pure and true. It was, perhaps, well for him that he was saved from temptation. A deeper morality replies that what was bad for Gustavus' cause and for his kind, could not be good for Gustavus; and that whether he were to stand or fall in the hour of temptation, he had better have lived his time and done his work. We, with our small philosophy, can make allowance for the greater dangers of the higher sphere; and shall we arrogate to ourselves a larger judgment and ampler sympathies than we allow to God? Yet Gustavus was happy. Among soldiers and statesmen, if there is a greater, there is hardly a purer name. He had won not only honour but love, and the friend and comrade was as much bewailed as the deliverer and the king. In him his Sweden appeared for the first and last time with true glory on the scene of universal history. In him the spirit of the famous house of Vasa rose to the first heroic height. It was soon to mount to madness in Christina and Charles XII. Not till a year had passed could Sweden bring herself to consign the remains of her Gustavus to the dust. Then came a hero's funeral, with pomp not unmeaning, with trophies not unbecoming the obsequies of a Christian warrior, and for mourners the sorrowing nations. In early youth Gustavus had loved the beautiful Ebba Brahe, daughter of a Swedish nobleman, and she had returned his love. But etiquette and policy interposed, and Gustavus married Eleanor, a princess of Brandenburg, also renowned for beauty. The widowed Queen of Gustavus, though she had loved him with a fondness too great for their perfect happiness, admitted his first love to a partnership in her grief, and sent Ebba with her own portrait the portrait of him who was gone where, if love still is, there is no more rivalry in love.