Formed in early antiquity, and crystallized during the barbarism of the middle ages, our cities, with their narrow streets and many-cornered houses, with the hereditary inconveniences and anomalies of their architecture, look often like so many labyrinths of stone, in which chance alone disposed the dwellings ; but in St. Petersburg, the offspring of a more enlightened age, every thing is arranged orderly and conveniently: the streets are broad, the open spaces regular, and the houses roomy. The fifty square versts destined for the Russian capital, allowed every house a sufhcient extent of ground. In our old German towns, tall distorted buildings seem every where squeezing each other out of shape, and panting, as it were, for want of room to breathe in ; whereas in St. Petersburg every house has an individuahty of its own, and stands boldly forth from the mass. Yet St. Petersburg is any thing but a picturesque city. All is airy and light. There is no shade about the picture, no variety of tone. Every thing is so convenient, so good-looking, so sensibly arranged, and so very modern, that Canaletto would have found it hard to have obtained for his canvass a single poetical tableau such as would have presented itself to him at every corner in omGerman cities, so rich in contrasts, recollections, and variegated life. The streets in St. Petersburg are so broad, the open places so vast, the arms of the river so mighty, that large as the houses are in themselves, they are made to appear small by the gigantic plan of the whole. This effect is increased by the extreme flatness of the site on which the city stands. No building is raised above the other. Masses of architecture, worthy of mountains for their pedestals, are ranged side by side in endless lines, Nowhere gratified, either by elevation or grouping, the eye wanders over a monotonous sea of undulating palaces.
This sameness of aspect is at no time more striking tlian in winter, when the streets, the river, and the houses are all covered with one white. The white walls of the buildings seem to have no hold upon the ground, and the Palmyra of the north, under her leaden sky, looks rather like the shadow than the substance of a city. There are things in nature pleasing to look upon and gratifying to think of, and yet any thing but picturesque, and one of these is St. Petersburg.
No other place, however, undergoes a more interesting change in spring, when the sky clears up, and the sun removes the pale shroud from the roofs and the waters. The houses seem to recover a firm footing on the ground, the lively green of the painted roofs, and the azure starspangled cupolas of the churches, with their gilt spires, throw off their monotonous icy covering ; the eye revels again in the long untasted enjoyment of colour, and the river, divested of its wintry garment, flows again in unrobed majesty, and gaily mirrors the palaces ranged along its banks.
As the city presents no elevated point, the spectator, to see it, must elevate hhnselj\ and for this purpose there is no place better suited than the tower of the Admiralty, from which the principal streets diverge, and near which the great arms of the river seem to meet. This tower is provided with a series of galleries, and the delightful views from those galleries on a fine spring day are not easily matched in any other city.
At the foot of the tower the inner yards of the Admiralty present themselves. There the timber from the forests of Vologda and Kostroma lies piled in huge heaps, and mighty ships of war are growing into life under the busy hands of swarms of workmen. On the other side lie the splendid squares or plokhtshods of the Admiralty, of Peter, and of the Court, along the sides of which are grouped the chief buildings of the capital. The Hotel de I'Etat Major, whence Russia's million of soldiers receive their orders; the Senate-house, and the Palace of the Holy Synod, in which the meum and tuum, the believing and rejecting, the temporal and the spiritual concerns of a hundred nations, are discussed and determined ; St. Isaac's Church, with its profusion of columns, in w^hich each stone is of colossal magnitude ; the War-office, where a thousand pens ply their peaceful labours in the service of Mars ; and the mighty Winter Palace, in a corner of which dwells the great man to whom one -tenth of the human race look up with hope or anxiety, and whose name is prized and dreaded, beyond any other, over one-half the surface of our globe.