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

212 THE BRIDGE OF THE NEVA.

advance, are all method, all order, and they consequently escape minute criticism ; but those who like me, say what they feel without troubling themselves as regards what they have felt, must expect to pay the penalty of their careless candour. This ingenuous and superstitious respect for truth is no doubt a flattery to the reader, but it is a flattery dangerous in the present day; and I sometimes, therefore, fear that the world in which Ave live cannot be worthy of the compliment.

I shall, in this case, have risked everything to satisfy the love of truth, a virtue which no one possesses, and by my imprudent zeal in sacrificing to a divinity which has no longer a temple, in taking an allegory for a reality, I shall miss the glory of the martyr and pass only for a simpleton. In a society where falsehood always obtains its reward, good faith is necessarily punished. The world has its crosses on which to nail every truth.

To meditate on these and many other matters, I stopped for a long time on the middle of the great bridge of the Neva. I wished to engrave in my memory the two different pictures which, by simply turning round, without leaving my place, I could enjoy. In the east was the dark sky and the bright earth, in the west the clear sky and the earth involved in shade: in the opposition of these two faces of Petersburg there was a symbolic meaning, into which I fancied I could penetrate. In the west I saw the ancient, in the east, the modern Petersburg; the past, the old city, was shrouded in night—the new, the future city, was revealed in radiance.

Petersburg appears to me less beautiful than Ve-