The parallel under which St. Petersburg has built palaces and cultivated gardens is the same under which in Siberia the Ostiaks and Tmigusians find a scanty nourishment of moss for their reindeer, and where the Kamtschadale drives his dogs over never-melting ice. In the same circle where St. Petersburg enjoys every luxury of the civilized and uncivilized world, the Greenlander and Esquimaux, with their seal fat and train oil, barely keep alive the feeble glimmer of vegetation rather than life. Swampy Livonia, which even the Poles call harsh and raw, the province whence come the wild and pitiless snow-storms, called by the
Tlio greater part of the Tuni^usians live further south. Okhotsk lies one dogreo, Tobolsk two, and the southern point of Kanitsehuka nearly nine degrees further south than St. Petershurg.
Prussians Courland weather, are to the St. Petersburgers very agreeable and tolerably warm southern provinces. In Poland the Russian begins to look about him for tropical vegetation ; and of the nebulosa Germania, whose frigora and giey skies inspire the shuddering Italian to strike the elegiac chords of his harp, the Petersburger tliirdcs as of a land " where the orange-trees bloom."
No city in Europe stands in such close relation to the beasts of the wilderness as St. Petersburg. Even at Stockholm a tolerable number of miles intervene between the city and the den of the wolf ; at St. Petersburg, the lurking-places of these gaunt animals, and the palaces of the princes, are within a neighbourly distance. It is a remarkable proof of the wildness of the environs of St. Petersburg, that between breakfast and dinner a man may go on a wolf or bear-hunt, as he may on a harehunt from Berlin. In hard winters hungry wolves have approached the suburbs, and even the neighbourhood of the imperial palace, in search of food. The imperial couriers despatched between the Winter Palace and the neighbouring residences have, even of late years, fallen more than once a prey to these animals : and there are in St. Petersburg many ladies whose elegant Parisian toilette has been exposed to dangerous proximity with the shaggy lords of the forest. I was told by one lady that she had in a garden scared a wolf with her parasol ; and by another how she had been sui'prised by a bear while reading on a bench in the garden of her vUla close to St. Petersburg, and how she had thrown a romance of George Sand at his head ! The Russians maintain that the bear is a great coward, and will never attack unless wounded or otherwise irritated. They relate many odd effects of sudden fright upon him, which, ho v\ ever they may merit the attention of the naturalist, can scarcely be related here. A boy was once sent from a country-house to fetch bread ; he came back without it, and said that he had met a bear on his way, and thrown the loaves at his head. On returning to the place indicated the bread was found there, and the bear not far off — dead. The people maintain that he died of a fit caused by the fright. All this shows how much the Fauns of the forest have still the advantage of Ceres and Flora in the environs of St. Petersburg- !
" For heaven's sake send me a picture of the sun,"' said a friend to me, as I was setting off for the south i. e Germany) ; " it seems to me years since I have seen the glorious divinity ! ' If in the other parts of the European world the German Apollo does not pass for the most attractive of gods, we may judge from the above remark what a St. Petersburg Phoebus must be like ! To feel this rightly one must have lived there ; one must have exchanged the pale grey of the St. Petersburg sky for the south, to know how beautiful, how enchanting can appear that German heaven which the French and Italians have so much to say against. Our hearts beat, and a tear of poetical emotion moistens our eyes, when we sing of the land of the citron and the myrtle. Even thus is the tenderness of a St. Petersburger awakened for countries where cherry and plum-trees are to be met with in the highways. According to the St. Petersburg calendar there are only ninety days when sunshine is to be expected, and then the smile of heaven is not seldom mingled with a frown. Their firmament is no firm lofty azure vault, but a grayish tent-cloth constantly fluttering m the wiiid.
St. Petersburg is not, however, more defective in its roof than in its