me bright June day, such as that on
which I first beheld it from that post. Under foot, as it seemed, from the
galleries, lay the Admiralty-yards, where great ships were in process of
erection, destined for no nobler service than to perform their three
months' summer cruise in the Baltic, and to be frozen immovably in the
harbors for six months out of twelve. The will of the Czar can effect
much, but it can not convert Russia into a naval power until he can secure
a seacoast, and harbors which can not be shut up to him by a single
hostile fortification. Russia can not be a maritime power till she is
mistress of the entrance to the Baltic and the Black Sea.

To the right and the left of the Admiralty stretch the great squares upon
which stand the principal public edifices and monuments of the capital;
the Winter Palace, with its six thousand constant occupants; the _Hotel de
l'Etat Major_, whence go forth orders to a million of soldiers, the Senate
House, and the Palace of the Holy Synod, the centres of temporal and
spiritual law for the hundred nations blended into the Russian Empire; the
Church of St. Isaac, with its four porticoes, the lofty columns of which,
sixty feet in height, are each of a single block of granite, and the walls
of polished marble; its cupola covered with copper overlaid with gold,
gleaming like another sun, surmounted by a golden cross, and forming the
most conspicuous object to the approaching visitor, whether he comes up
the Gulf, or across the dreary Finnish marshes; yet, high as it rises in
the air, it sinks scarcely a less distance below the ground, so deep was
it necessary to drive into the marsh the forest of piles upon which it
rests, before a firm foundation could be secured. Here is the Statue of
Peter--the finest equestrian statue in the world--reining his steed upon the
brink of the precipice up which he has urged it, his hand stretched out in
benediction toward the Neva, the pride of his new-founded city. Here is
the triumphal column to Alexander, "the Restorer of Peace," the whole
elevation of which is 150 feet, measuring to the head of the angel who--the
cross victorious over the crescent--bears the symbol of the Christian faith
above the capital cast from cannon captured from the Turks. The shaft is a
single block eighty-four feet in height--the largest single stone erected
in modern times; and it would have been still loftier had it not been for
the blind unreasoning obedience to o