tched. The traveller flies by no ranges
of trim palings and tidy cottages; he sees the same dingy groups of huts
here as elsewhere, the same cultivation looking for no morrow, the same
tokens that the laborer is not thought worthy of his hire. This same
tendency to great single works, this same fear of great connected
systems, this same timid isolation of great creations from principles
essential to their growth, is seen, too, in Nicholas's church-building.

Foremost of all the edifices on which Nicholas lavished the wealth of
the empire stands the Isak Church in St. Petersburg. It is one of the
largest and certainly the richest cathedral in Christendom. All is
polished pink granite and marble and bronze. On all sides are double
rows of Titanic columns, each a single block of polished granite with
bronze capital. Colossal masses of bronze statuary are grouped over each
front; high above the roof and surrounding the great drums of the domes
are lines of giant columns in granite bearing giant statues in bronze;
and crowning all rises the vast central dome, flanked by its four
smaller domes, all heavily plated with gold.

The church within is one gorgeous mass of precious marbles and mosaics
and silver and gold and jewels. On the tabernacle of the altar, in gold
and malachite, on the screen of the altar, with its pilasters of lapis
lazuli and its range of malachite columns fifty feet high, were lavished
millions on millions. Bulging from the ceilings are massy bosses of
Siberian porphyry and jasper. To decorate the walls with unfading
pictures, Nicholas founded an establishment for mosaic work, where sixty
pictures were commanded, each demanding, after all artistic labor, the
mechanical labor of two men for four years.

Yet this vast work is not so striking a monument of Nicholas's luxury as
of his timidity. For this cathedral and some others almost as grand
were, in part at least, results of the deep wish of Nicholas to wean his
people from their semi-idolatrous love for dark, confined, filthy
sanctuaries, like those of Moscow; but here again is a timid purpose and
half result; Nicholas dared set no adequate enginery working at the
popular religious training or moral training. There had been such an
organization, the Russian Bible Society, favored by Alexander I; but
Nicholas swept it away at one stroke of the pen. Evidently, he feared
lest Scriptural denunciations of certain sins in ancient politics might
be popularly