o you, urging its
acceptance; but I preferred leaving your own judgment to settle the
question. Still, I can give you some personal knowledge on the
subject of Russia. I have been there for the last six months. My
daughter--for what purpose I have never been able to
ascertain--took a sudden whim of hating Switzerland, and loving the
snows and deserts of the North. But I have known the sex too long,
ever to think of combating their wills by argument.--The only
chance of success is to give way to them. Mariamne, sick of hills
and valleys, and unable to breathe in the purest air of the globe,
determined to try the exhalations from the marshes of the Neva.
But, she is my child, after all--the only being for whom I
live--and I was peculiarly grateful that she had not fixed on
Siberia, or taken a resolution to live and die at Pekin. I do not
regret my journey. It has thrown a new light on me. I must
acknowledge to you, that I was astonished at Russia. I had known it
in early life, and thought that I knew it well. But it is
singularly changed. The spirit of the people--the country--the
throne itself--have undergone the most remarkable of silent
revolutions, and the most effective of all. Russia is now Russia no
longer; she is Greece, Germany, France--and she will yet be
England. Her politics and her faculties, alike, embrace the
civilized world. She is Greece in her subtlety, Germany in her
intelligence, and France in her ambition. St Petersburg is less the
capital of her empire, though of all capitals the most magnificent,
than an emblem of her mind. I often stood on the banks of the Neva,
and, looking round me on their mass of palaces, involuntarily asked
myself--Could all this have been the work of a single mind? Other
capitals have been the work of necessity, of chance, of national
defence, of the mere happiness of location. But this was founded in
ambition alone--founded by the sovereign will of one who felt, that
in it he was erecting an empire of conquest; and that from this
spot, in after ages, was to pour forth the force that was to absorb
every other dominion of the world. Peter fixed on the site of his
city to tell this to the world. I see in its framer, and in its
site, the living words--'I fix my future capital in a
wilderness--in a swamp--in a region of tempests--on the sh