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

creature : eye for eye, tooth for tooth, life for life ; in short the law of retaliation was politic. A society that wishes to subsist must cast from its bosom the criminal. When Jesus Christ came to substitute his law of love in the place of the stern justice of Moses, he well knew that it would abridge the duration of the kingdoms of the earth, but he opened to men the

kingdom of heavenWithout eternity and

immortality, Christianity would cost to earth more than it restores. This was my waking dream throughout the night.

A train of vague ideas, phantoms of the mind, half active, half torpid, wandered slowly through my brain : the gallop of the horses that bore me along seemed more rapid than the flights of my burdened thoughts; the body appeared to have wings, the mind had become lead. I left it, as it were, behind me, as I passed over the ground more quickly than imagination could traverse space. The steppes, the marshes with their spiry pines and stunted birches, the villages, the towns, flew across my eyes like fantastic figures, before I was able to account to myself how I had been brought before this moving scene, where the soul could not keep pace with the

body, so singularly was sensation quickened !

This overturning of nature, these mental deceptions of which the cause was physical, this optical illusion applied to the mechanism of ideas, this displacing of life, these voluntary dreams, were prolonged by the monotonous songs of the men who drove my horses, — lugubrious notes, like some of the chants of our churches, or rather like the nasal accents of the old Jews in the German synagogues. They say these