y painted and decorated in the interior. It is the same
with the walls covered with those barbaric and hieratic figures,
the traditional designs for which the Greek monks of Mount Athos
have preserved from century to century, and which, in Russia, often
deceive the careless observer regarding the age of a building.
It is a peculiar sensation to find yourself in these mysterious
sanctuaries, where personages familiar to the Roman Catholic cult,
mingle with the saints peculiar to the Greek Calendar, and seem in
their archaic Byzantine and constrained appearance to have been
translated awkwardly into gold by the childish devotion of a primitive
race. These images that you view across the carved and silver-gilt
work of the iconostas, where they are ranged symmetrically upon
the golden screen opening their large fixed eyes and raising their
brown hand with the fingers turned in a symbolic fashion, produce, by
means of their somewhat savage, superhuman and immutable traditional
aspect, a religious impression not to be found in more advanced
works of art. These figures, seen amid the golden reflections and
twinkling light of the lamps, easily assume a phantasmagorical
life, capable of impressing sensitive imaginations and of creating,
especially at the twilight hour, a peculiar kind of sacred awe.

Narrow corridors, low arched passages, so narrow that your elbows
brush the walls and so low that you have to bend your head, circle
about these chapels and lead from one to the other. Nothing could
be more fantastic than these passages; the architect seems to have
taken pleasure in tangling up their threading ways. You ascend, you
descend, you seem to go out of the building, you seem to return,
twisting about a cornice to follow the curves of a bell-tower,
and walking through thick walls in tortuous passages that might
be compared to the capillary tubes of madrepores, or to the roads
made by insects in the barks of trees. After so many turnings and
windings, your head swims, a vertigo seizes you, and you wonder if
you are not a mollusk in an immense shell. I do not speak of the
mysterious corners, of inexplicable coecums, low doors opening no
one knows whither, dark stairways descending into profound depths;
for I could never finish talking of this architecture, which you
seem to walk through as if in a dream.

_POLAND_

_THOMAS MICHELL_

The Tsar still bears the title of King of Poland, but the constitutional
kingdom c