them
to the Turkish general as a present, and favorable terms are secured.
But Peter loses Azof, and is shut out from the Black Sea, and is
compelled to withdraw from the vicinity of the Danube. The Baltic is
however still open to him; and in the mean time he has transferred his
capital to a new city, which he built on the Gulf of Finland.

It was during his Swedish war, about the year 1702, when he had driven
the Swedes from Ladoga and the Neva, that he fixed his eyes upon a
miserable morass, a delta, half under water, formed by the dividing
branches of the Neva, as the future seat of his vast empire. It was a
poor site for a capital city, inaccessible by water half the year,
without stones, without wood, without any building materials, with a
barren soil, and liable to be submerged in a storm. Some would say it
was an immense mistake to select such a place for the capital of an
empire stretching even to the Pacific ocean. But it was the only place
he could get which opened a water communication with Western Europe. He
could not Europeanize his empire without some such location for his new
capital. So St. Petersburg arose above the marshes of the Neva as if by
magic, built in a year, on piles, although it cost him the lives of one
hundred thousand men. "We never could look on this capital," says
Motley, "with its imposing though monotonous architecture, its colossal
squares, its vast colonnades, its endless vistas, its spires and
minarets sheathed in barbaric gold and flashing in the sun, and remember
the magical rapidity with which it was built, without recalling Milton's
description of Pandemonium:--

"'As bees
In spring time, when the sun with Taurus rides,
Pour forth their populous youth about the hive
In clusters: they among fresh dews and flowers
Fly to and fro, or on the smoothed plank,
The suburb of their straw-built citadel,
Now rubbed with balm, expatiate, and confer
Their state affairs: so thick the aery crowd
Swarm'd and were straighten'd; till, the signal given,
Behold a wonder!'

"The transfer of the seat of government, by the removal of the senate
from Moscow, was effected a few years afterwards. Since that time, the
repudiated Oriental capital of the ancient Czars, with her golden tiara
and Eastern robe, has sat, like Hagar in the wilderness, deserted and
lonely in all her barbarian beauty. Yet even now, in many a bac