and white complexions,
bear no resemblance to the vivacity of the Russian countenance; but
their manners are also much milder; the common people have a settled
probity, the result of protestant instruction, and purity of
manners. On Sundays, the young women are seen returning from sermon
on horseback, and the young men following them. You will frequently
receive hospitality from the pastors of Finland, who regard it as
their duty to give a lodging to travellers, and nothing can be more
pure or delightful than the reception you meet with in those
families; there are scarcely any noblemens' seats in Finland, so
that the pastors are generally the most important personages of the
country. In several Finnish songs, the young girls offer to their
lovers to sacrifice the residence of the pastor, even if it was
offered to them to share. This reminds me of the expression of a
young shepherd, "If I was a king, I would keep my sheep on
horseback." The imagination itself scarcely goes beyond what is
known.

The aspect of nature is very different in Finland to what it is in
Russia; in place of the marshes and plains which surround St.
Petersburg, you find rocks, almost mountains, and forests: but after
a time, these mountains, and those forests, composed of the same
trees, the fir and the birch, become monotonous. The enormous blocks
of granite which are seen scattered through the country, and on the
borders of the high roads, give the country an air of vigor; but
there is very little life around these great bones of the earth, and
vegetation begins to decrease from the latitude of Finland to the
last degree of the animated world. We passed through a forest half
consumed by fire; the north winds which add to the force of the
flames, render these fires very frequent, both in the towns and in
the country. Man has in all ways great difficulty in maintaining the
struggle with nature in these frozen climates. You meet with few
towns in Finland, and those few are very thinly peopled. There is no
centre, no emulation, nothing to say, and very little to do, in a
northern Swedish or Russian province, and during eight months of the
year, the whole of animated nature is asleep.

The Emperor Alexander possessed himself of Finland after the treaty
of Tilsit, and at a period when the deranged intellects of the
monarch who then reigned in Sweden, Gustavus IV., rendered him
incapable of defending his country. The moral character of this
prince