Of all the great European cities, the one that most resembles the capital of the Tsars is Berlin.  Both are built on perfectly level ground; both have wide, regularly arranged streets; in both there is a general look of stiffness and symmetry which suggests military discipline and German bureaucracy.  But there is at least one profound difference.  Though Berlin is said by geographers to be built on the Spree, we might live a long time in the city without noticing the sluggish little stream on which the name of a river has been undeservedly conferred.  St. Petersburg, on the contrary, is built on a magnificent river, which forms the main feature of the place.  By its breadth, and by the enormous volume of its clear, blue, cold water, the Neva is certainly one of the noblest rivers of Europe.  A few miles before reaching the Gulf of Finland it breaks up into several streams and forms a delta.  It is here that St. Petersburg stands.

Like the river, everything in St. Petersburg is on a colossal scale.  The streets, the squares, the palaces, the public buildings, the churches, whatever may be their defects, have at least the attribute of greatness, and seem to have been designed for the countless generations to come, rather than for the practical wants of the present inhabitants.  In this respect the city well represents the Empire of which it is the capital.  Even the private houses are built in enormous blocks and divided into many separate apartments.  Those built for the working classes sometimes contain, I am assured, more than a thousand inhabitants.  How many cubic feet of air is allowed to each person, I do not know; not so many, I fear, as is recommended by the most advanced sanitary authorities.

For a detailed description of the city I must refer the reader to the guide books.  Among its numerous monuments, of which the Russians are justly proud, I confess that the one which interested me most was neither St. Isaac’s Cathedral, with its majestic gilded dome, its colossal monolithic columns of red granite, and its gaudy interior; nor the Hermitage, with its magnificent collection of Dutch pictures; nor the gloomy, frowning fortress of St. Peter and St. Paul, containing the tombs of the Emperors.  These and other “sights” may deserve all the praise which enthusiastic tourists have lavished upon them, but what made a far deeper impression on me was the little wooden house in which Peter the Great lived whilst his future capital was being built.  In its style and arrangement it looks more like the hut of a navvy than the residence of a Tsar, but it was quite in keeping with the character of the illustrious man who occupied it.  Peter could and did occasionally work like a navvy without feeling that his Imperial dignity was thereby impaired.  When he determined to build a new capital on a Finnish marsh, inhabited chiefly by wildfowl, he did not content himself with exercising his autocratic power in a comfortable arm chair.  Like the Greek gods, he went down from his Olympus and took his place in the ranks of ordinary mortals, superintending the work with his own eyes, and taking part in it with his own hands.  If he was as arbitrary and oppressive as any of the pyramid-building Pharaohs, he could at least say in self-justification that he did not spare himself any more than his people, but exposed himself freely to the discomforts and dangers under which thousands of his fellow-labourers succumbed.