eye
might seem to range across a garden of gourds, at other positions
peer above house-tops groups which might be mistaken for turbaned
Turks; and when the sun shines vividly, and throws glittering light
on the "patens of bright gold," over these many-domed churches,
a stranger might almost fancy that above the city floated fire
balloons or bright-coloured lanterns. The large cupola of St. Isaac,
covered with copper overlaid with gold, has been said to burn on
a bright day like the sun when rising on a mountain top. I can
never forget the sight when I returned to St. Petersburg from the
most brilliant civic and military spectacle I ever witnessed, the
fete of the Empress at Tsarskoe Selo. It was still dark, but before
I reached my hotel for the short repose of a night which already
brightened into morning, every cupola on the way was awakening
into daylight; the sun, hesitating for a moment on the horizon,
announced his coming as by electric light on the golden stars which
shone on domes more blue than the grey sky of morning. In Moscow
church cupolas playa part in the city panorama still more conspicuous
than in St. Petersburg.

The Cathedral of St. Isaac is the most costly and pretentious of
Russian churches. The noble edifice has the advantage of a commanding
situation; not, it is true, as to elevation--for that is impossible
in a city set throughout on a dead level--but the surface area in
its wide sweeping circuit at all events contrasts strikingly with
that cribbed and cabined church-yard of St. Paul's in London, which
the Englishman may have just left behind him. Yet St. Isaac's can
scarcely venture on comparison with St. Paul's, though the style of
the two buildings is similar. The great Cathedral of St. Petersburg
has, however, the advantage of that concentration which belongs to
the Greek as distinguished from the Latin Cross, a distinction
which has always been to the disadvantage of St. Peter's in Rome.
A cross of four equal arms, with columned porticos mounted nobly
on steps at the four extremities, the whole composition crowned by
central and surrounding cupolas, is assuredly an imposing conception,
of which the French artist M. Montferrand has known how to make
the most. I may here, by way of parenthesis, remark that the two
works which do most honour to St. Petersburg, the Cathedral of
St. Isaac and the adjacent equestrian statue of Peter the Great,
are severally due not to Russian but to French artist