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

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impression, rivals the richness and variety of the most celebrated landscapes of the earth. They present no pompous, artificial work, nor agreeable invention, but a profound solitude, a solitude terrible and beautiful as death. From one end of her plains, from one shore of her seas to the other, Russia hears that voice of God which nothing can silence, and which says to man, puffed up with the contemptible magnificence of his miserable cities, " Your labour is vain, I am still the greatest! " Often a countenance devoid of beauty has more expression, and engraves itself on our memory in a manner more ineffaceable than those regular traits which display neither passion nor sentiment. Such is the effect of our instinct of immortality, that the things which most highly interest an inhabitant of eai`th are those which speak to him of something unearthly.

Нолу admirable is the power of the primitive endowment of nations ! For more than a hundred years the higher classes of Russians, the nobles, the learned, and the powerful of the land, have been begging ideas and copying models from all the communities of Europe; and yet this absurd phantasy of princes and courtiers has not prevented the people from remaining; original.*

The finely endowed Slavonic race has too delicate a touch to mingle indiscriminately with the Teutonic people. The German character has even at this day a less affinity with the Russian than has the Spanish, with its cross of Arab blood. Slowness, heaviness,

* This reproach, which applies to Peter I. and his immediate successors, completes the eulogy of the Emperor Nicholas, who has begun to stem the torrent of the mania.