than
mind, money rather than art, is the governing power; malachite,
lapis-lazuli, gold, and other precious substances are heaped together
profusely, yet no architect in Europe of the slightest intellectual
pretensions, would care to look a second time at the constructive
or decorative conceptions which the churches of St. Petersburg
display. St. Isaac's in fact is miraculous only in its monoliths.
I could scarcely believe my eyes when first I stood beneath the
stately porticos and looked from top to bottom of the very many
columns, seven feet in diameter and sixty feet high, all polished
granite monoliths from Finland. Already I had made the assertion
that there was nothing new in St. Petersburg when these granite
monoliths at once compelled a recantation.

The monoliths in St. Petersburg are so exceptional in number and
often so gigantic in dimension as to call for special mention. The
monolith obelisks of ancient Egypt are scarcely more remarkable.
In addition to the magnificent columns, each sixty feet high, which
sustain the four porticos of the Cathedral of St. Isaac, are fifty-six
monoliths, also of granite from Finland, thirty-five feet high
in the Kazan Cathedral; likewise the noble entrance-hall of the
Hermitage is sustained by sixteen monoliths, and the magnificent
room which receives the treasures from the Cimmerian Bosphorus has
the support of twenty monoliths. But the greatest single block of
modern times stands in front of the Winter Palace, as a monument
to Alexander I. The height is eighty-four feet, and the weight
nearly four hundred tons. The story goes that the contractor in
Finland, finding that he had exceeded the required length, actually
cut off ten or fifteen feet. The vast granite quarries of Finland
supply the Tsars with these stupendous columns, just as the granite
quarries of Syene on the Nile furnished the Pharaohs with obelisks.
These enormous masses are too heavy to be conveyed on wheels, the
only practicable mode of transit is on rollers. In this way each of
the sixty-feet columns for St. Isaac's was transported across country
all the way from Finland. Each column represents so incredible an
amount of labour as to make it evident that monoliths are luxuries
in which only emperors can indulge. And even when these heavy weights
have reached their destination the difficulty next occurs how to
secure a solid foundation. St. Petersburg was once a swamp, and so
rotten is the ground that it w