here and there peeped out the bright green cupolas of some little
church, none of which, I was glad to see, slipped out of the panorama
without its share of reverence.

For some miles we sailed between a double row of contiguous villages,--a
long suburb of the capital, which stretched on and on, until the slight
undulations of the shore showed that we had left behind us the dead
level of the Ingrian marshes. It is surprising what an interest one
takes in the slightest mole-hill, after living for a short time on a
plain. You are charmed with an elevation which enables you to look over
your neighbor's hedge. I once heard a clergyman, in his sermon, assert
that "the world was perfectly smooth before the fall of Adam, and the
present inequalities in its surface were the evidences of human sin." I
was a boy at the time, and I thought to myself, "How fortunate it is
that we are sinners!" Peter the Great, however, had no choice left him.
The piles he drove in these marshes were the surest foundation of his
empire.

The Neva, in its sudden and continual windings, in its clear, cold,
sweet water, and its fringing groves of birch, maple, and alder,
compensates, in a great measure, for the flatness of its shores. It has
not the slow magnificence of the Hudson or the rush of the Rhine, but
carries with it a sense of power, of steady, straightforward force, like
that of the ancient warriors who disdained all clothing except their
swords. Its naked river-god is not even crowned with reeds, but the full
flow of his urn rolls forth undiminished by summer and unchecked beneath
its wintry lid. Outlets of large lakes frequently exhibit this
characteristic, and the impression they make upon the mind does not
depend on the scenery through which they flow. Nevertheless, we
discovered many points the beauty of which was not blotted out by rain