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

RESTORATION OF THE CAPITAL.23

disposal — elements which he slighted with a contempt and with a su])erficiality of mind unworthy of a superior man, as, in certain respects, he was. At each step that the stranger takes on the road from Petersburg to Moscow, Russia, with its illimitable territory, its immense agricultural resources, expands and enlarges on the mind in a measure equal to that in which Peter the Great diminished and contracted it. Monomaclms, in the eleventh century, was a truly Russian prince; Peter I., in the eighteenth, was, in his false method of improving, nothing more than a tributary of foreigners, an imitator of the Dutch, a mimicker of civilisation, which he copied with the minuteness of a savage.

If I were ever to see the throne of Russia majestically replaced upon its true basis, in the centre of the empire, at Moscow ; if St. Petersburg, its stuccoes and gilt work, left to crumble in the marsh whereon it is reared, were to become only what it should have always been, a simple naval port, built of granite, a magnificent entrepot of commerce between Russia and the West, as, on the other side, Kazan and Nijni serve as steps between Russia and the East; I should say that the Slavonian nation, triumphing by a just pride over the vanity of its leaders, sees at length its proper course, and deserves to attain the object of its ambition. Constantinople waits for it; there arts and riches will naturally flow, in recompense of the efforts of a people, called to be so much the more great and glorious as they have been long obscure and resigned. Let the mind picture to itself the grandeur of a capital seated in the centre of a plain many thousands of leagues in extent — a plain which stretches