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

THE EMrEROR EVERYWHERE.61

conducted in military order, and where human life seems reduced to the action of the pendulum of a clock.

The reader must learn from others all that is to be seen in these useful and superb nurseries of officers, mothers of families, and governesses : it will suffice for me to say, that the institutions, half political, half charitable, appear models of good order, eare, and cleanliness—a fact which does honour to the heads of the different schools, as well as to the supreme head of the empire.

It is impossible for a single moment to forget that one individual by whom Russia lives, thinks, and acts,—that man, alike the science and the conscience of his people, who commands, measures, and distributes all that is necessary or permitted to other men, none of whom may think, feel, will, or imagine, except within the sphere marked out by the supreme wisdom which foresees, or is supposed to foresee, all the wants of the individual as well as of the State.

Among us there is the fatigue of licence and variety; here we are discouraged by uniformity, frozen over by pedantry, which yet we may not separate from the idea of order; whence it follows, that we hate what we ought to love. Russia, that infant nation, is nothing more than an immense college ; every thing is conducted there as in a military school, the only difference being, that the scholars never leave it until they die.

All that is German in the spirit of the Russian government is antipathetic to the Slavonian character. The latter oriental, nonchalant, capricious, and poetical people, if they said what they thought, woidd