, substantial young Lady comes to light there; dropped into such
an element as might have driven most people mad. But it did not her; it
only made her wiser and wiser in her generation. Element black, hideous,
dirty, as Lapland Sorcery;--in which the first clear duty is, to hold
one's tongue well, and keep one's eyes open. Stars,--not very heavenly,
but of fixed nature, and heavenly to Catharine,--a star or two, shine
through the abominable murk: Steady, patient; steer silently, in all
weathers, towards these!

"Young Catharine's immovable equanimity in this distracted environment
strikes us very much. Peter is careering, tumbling about, on all manner
of absurd broomsticks, driven too surely by the Devil; terrific-absurd
big Lapland Witch, surrounded by multitudes smaller, and some of them
less ugly. Will be Czar of Russia, however;--and is one's so-called
Husband. These are prospects for an observant, immovably steady-going
young Woman! The reigning Czarina, old CATIN herself, is silently
the Olympian Jove to Catharine, who reveres her very much. Though
articulately stupid as ever, in this Book of Catharine's, she comes out
with a dumb weight, of silence, of obstinacy, of intricate abrupt rigor,
which--who knows but it may savor of dumb unconscious wisdom in the fat
old blockhead? The Book says little of her, and in the way of criticism,
of praise or of blame, nothing whatever; but one gains the notion of
some dark human female object, bigger than one had fancied it before.

"Catharine steered towards her stars. Lovers were vouchsafed her, of
a kind (her small stars, as we may call them); and, at length,
through perilous intricacies, the big star, Autocracy of All the
Russias,--through what horrors of intricacy, that last! She had hoped
always it would be by Husband Peter that she, with the deeper steady
head, would be Autocrat: but the intricacies kept increasing, grew at
last to the strangling pitch; and it came to be, between Peter and her,
'Either you to Siberia (perhaps FARTHER), or else I!' And it was Peter
that had to go;--in what hideous way is well enough known; no Siberia,
no Holstein thought to be far enough for Peter:--and Catharine, merely
weeping a little for him, mounted to the Autocracy herself. And then,
the big star of stars being once hers, she had, not in the lover kind
alone, but in all uncelestial kinds, whole nebulae and milky-ways of
small stars. A very Semiramis, the Louis-Quatorze of those Nor