-line" road, and so perfect
that the traveller finds few places where the rails do not meet on
either side of him in the horizon. The track is double,--the rails very
heavy and admirably ballasted,--station-houses and engine-houses are
splendid in build, perfect in arrangement, and surrounded by neat
gardens. The whole work is worthy of the Pyramid-builders. The
traveller is whirled by culverts, abutments, and walls of dressed
granite,--through cuttings where the earth on either side is carefully
paved or turfed to the summit. Ranges of Greek columns are reared as
crossings in the midst of broad marshes,--lions' heads in bronzed iron
stare out upon vast wastes where never rose even the smoke from a serf's
kennel.

All this seems good; and a ride of four hundred miles through such
glories rarely fails to set the traveller at chanting the praises of the
Emperor who conceived them. But when the traveller notes that complete
isolation of the work from all conditions necessary to its success, his
praises grow fainter. He sees that Nicholas held back from continuing
the road to Odessa, though half the money spent in making the road an
Imperial plaything would have built a good, solid extension to that
most important seaport; he sees that Nicholas dared not untie
police-regulations, and that commerce is wretchedly meagre. Contrary to
what would obtain under a free system, this great public work found the
country wretched and left it wretched. The traveller flies by no ranges
of trim palings and tidy cottages; he sees the same dingy groups of huts
here as elsewhere,--the same cultivation looking for no morrow,--the
same tokens that the laborer is _not_ thought worthy of his hire.

This same tendency to great single works, this same fear of great
connected systems, this same timid isolation of great creations from
principles essential to their growth is seen, too, in Nicholas's
church-building.

Foremost of all the edifices on which Nicholas lavished the wealth of
the Empire stands the Isak Church in St. Petersburg. It is one of the
largest, and certainly the richest, cathedral in Christendom. All is
polished pink granite and marble and bronze. On all sides are double
rows of Titanic columns,--each a single block of polished granite with
bronze capital. Colossal masses of bronze statuary are grouped over each
front; high above the roof and surrounding the great drums of the domes
are lines of giant columns in granite bearing