Russia in 1839 -Empire of the Czar: A Journey Through Eternal Russia

RUSSIAN ARCHITECTURE.127

" I shall not much care,"' I answered, coolly, " though my enthusiasm appears to you ridiculous, if I only succeed in awakening in you a sentiment of the beautiful. The choice of the sites alone of the edifices, villages, and towns of Italy, reveals to me the genius of a people born for the arts. In the localities where commerce has accumulated wealth, as at Genoa, Venice, and the feet of all the great passes of the Alps, what use have the inhabitants made of the treasures they amassed? They have bordered their seas, lakes, rivers, and precipices with enchanted palaces,— ramparts of marble raised by genii. It is not alone on the borders of the Brenta that these miracles are to be seen; every mountain has its prodigy. Towns and villages, churches, castles, convents, bridges, villas, hermitages, the retreats of penitence as well as the abodes of pleasure and luxury, all so strike the imagination of the traveller as to weave a spell over the mind as well as the eye. The grandeur of the masses, the harmony of the lines are new to the men of the north. Add to this the associations of history.— Greece herself, notwithstanding her sublime but too scarce relics, less astonishes the greater number of pilgrims; for the ages of barbarism have left Greece empty, and the land requires to be searched in order to be appreciated. Italy, on the contrary, needs only to be looked at —"

" How," interrupted the impatient Russian,—¢¢ how can you expect us inhabitants of Petersburg and Moscow to be astonished, as you are, with Italian architecture ? Do you not see models of it at every step you take in even the smallest of our towns and cities ? »