Nevskoï is something like a street. This
astonishing thoroughfare, now one corridor
of palaces and churches, and gorged with the
outward and visible riches of nobles, and
priests, and merchants, was, a century and
a half ago, but a bridle-path through a dense
forest leading from a river to a morass. The
road was pierced in seventeen hundred and
thirteen, and a few miserable wooden huts
thrown together on its borders by the man
who, under Heaven, seems to have made
every mortal thing in Russia—Peter the
Great. Now, you find on the Nevskoï the
cathedral of Our Lady of Kasan; the
Lutheran church of Saint Peter and Saint
Paul, the great Catholic church of the Assumption,
the Dutch church, the imperial palace of
Anitchkoff, the splendid Alexksandra theatre,
the Place Michel, with its green English
square, its palace and its theatre: the
Strogonoff Palace, the Roumiantzoff Palace, the
Galitzin Palace, the Belozelsky Palace, the
Branitzky Palace, the—the—for goodness
sake, go fetch a guide-book, and see how
many hundred palaces more! On
Nevskoï are the façades of the curious semi-
Asiatic bazaar, the Gostinnoï-Dvor, the
imperial library (O! British Museum
quadrangles, glass roof, duplicate copies, five
thousand pounds' worth of decoration,
museum flea, and all, you are but a
bookstall to it!), the Armenian church, the
monuments of Souvorov (our Suwarrow, and
spelt in Russ thus: Cybopob), of Barclay de
Tolly. On to the Nevskoï débouche the
aristocratic Morskaias, which, the Balchoi
and the Mala, or Great and Little, are at
once the Bond Streets and the Belgravias of
Petersburg. On to the Nevskoï opens the
Mala Millione, a short but courtly street,
terminated by a triumphal archway,
monstrous and magnificent, surmounted by a
car of Victory, with its eight horses abreast
in bronze, and through which you may
descry the red granite column of the Czar
Alexksandra Pavlovitch (Napoleon's
Alexander) and the immense Winter Palace. On
to the Nevskoï yawns the long perspective
of the Liteinaïa, the dashing street of the
Cannouschina, or imperial stables, the palace
and garden-lined avenue of the Sadovvaia,
or Great Garden Street. And the Nevskoï
is intersected by three Venice-like canals; by
the canal of the Moïka, at the Polizeïsky-Most
or Police Bridge; by the Ekaterininskoï, at
the Kasansky-Most or Kasan Bridge; and by
the Fontanka (Count Orloff's office—the
office where ladies have been, like horses,
"taken in to bate"—is on the Fontanka) at
the Anitchkoff Bridge. At about five hundred
sagenes from this bridge there is another
canal, but not quite so handsome a one—the
Ligoff. And at one extremity of this Nevskoï
of wonders is a convent as big as an
English market-town, and with three churches
within its walls, while the other end finishes
with the tapering golden spire of the Admiralty
(there are two Admiralties in this town-
residence of theTitans), which Admiralty has
a church, a library, an arsenal, amuseum, a
dockyard, and a cadet's college under its roof,
and such an unaccountable host of rooms, that
I think every cabin-boy in the fleet must
have a separate apartment there when he is
on shore, and every boatswain's cat have a
private storeroom for each and every one of
its nine tails.

At the first blush, seven in the evening
would not seem precisely the best chosen
time for a minute examination of a street
one has never seen before. In England or
France, at this early spring-time, it would
be sunset, almost twilight, blind man's
holiday. And there is not a gas–lamp on the
Nevskoï to illumine me in my researches.
The posts are there: massive, profusely-
ornamented pillars of wrought-iron or bronze;
but not a lamp for love or money. But you
will understand the place when I tell you
that it will be a broad staring daylight on the
Nevskoï till half-past eleven of the clock
to-night; that after that time there will be
a soft, still, dreamy, mysterious semi-twilight
such as sometimes veils the eyes of a woman
you love, when you are sitting silent by her
side, silent and happy, thinking of her, while
she, with those inscrutable twilight orbs, is
thinking of—God knows what (perhaps of
the somebody else by whose side she used to
sit, and whom you would so dearly love to
strangle, if it were all the same to her); and
then, at half–past one in the morning, comes
the brazen staring morning light again. For
from this May middle to the end of July, there
will be no more night in St. Petersburg.

No night! why can't you cover up the sky
then? why not roof in the Nevskoï—the
whole bad city—with black crape? Why
not force masks on all your slaves, or blind
them? For, as true as heaven, there are
things done here that God's sun should never
shine upon. Cover up that palace. Cover
up that house on the Fontanka. Cover up,
for shame's sake, that police-yard, that
Christians may not hear the women scream.
Cover them up thick and threefold; for, of a
surety, if the light comes in, the truth will
out, and Palace and Fontanka house and
Goal-yard walls will come tumbling about your
ears, insensate and accursed, and crush you.

At the Admiralty corner of the Nevskoï I
make my first cordial salutation to the fine
arts in Russia. This long range of plate-
glass windows appertains to the ingenious
Italian, Signor Daziaro, whose handsome
print-shop, with the elaborate Russian
inscription on the frontage, has no doubt often
pleased and puzzled you on the Boulevard
des Capucines in Paris; and who has
succursal fine-arts' establishments in Moscow,
in Warsaw, and I believe also in Odessa, as
well as this one in St. Petersburg. Daziario
is the Russian Ackermann's. For the newest
portrait of the Czar, for the latest lithographs