h lay within the harbour, or behind the fortifications.
Passing Cronstadt the capital soon comes in sight; the water is so
smooth and shallow, and the banks are so low, that I was actually
reminded of the lagoons of Venice. Far away in the distance glittered
in the sunlight cupola beyond cupola, covered with burnished gold or
sparkling with bright stars on a blue ground. The river, stretching
wide as an estuary, was thronged with merchandise as the Tagus or the
Thames: yachts were flying before the wind and steam-tugs laboured
slowly against the stream, dragging behind the heavily-laden lighter.
Warehouses and wharfs and timber-yards now begin to line either bank;
yet the materials for a sketch-book are scanty and uninviting: an
artist who, like Mr. Whistler, has etched at Battersea and Blackwell,
would find by comparison on the Neva the forms without character,
the surface without texture, the masses without light, shade, or
colour. As the boat advances the imperial city grows in scale and
pomp. The river view becomes imposing, the banks are lined on either
side by granite quays, which for solidity, strength, and area, have
no parallel in Europe. Beneath the bridges the unruly river rushes,
bearing along rafts and merchandise, and in the broad-laid streets
people hurry to and fro, as if the day were too short for the press
of business: only in great commercial capitals, the centres of large
populations, is life thus rapid and overburdened. Throughout Russia
generally time hangs heavily, but here at the seat of empire, the
focus of commerce, life under high pressure moves at full speed. I
know of no European capital, excepting perhaps London and Vienna,
which leaves on the mind so strong an impression of power, wealth,
and ostentation, as the city of St. Petersburg.

Possibly the first idea which may strike the stranger on driving
from the steamer to the hotel, is the large scale on which the
city has been planned; the area of squares and streets seems
proportioned to the vast dimensions of the Russian empire: indeed
the silent solitudes of the city may be said to symbolize the desert
tracks of central Russia and Siberia. Only on the continent of
America is so much land at command, so large a sweep of territory
brought within the circuit of city life. In the old world, Munich
offers the closest analogy to St. Petersburg, and that not only
by wide and half-occupied areas, but by a certain pretentious and
pseudo-classic