“Moscow, Sept. 9.—We left St. Petersburg on Monday, and went to Novgorod the Great, one of the oldest cities in Russia, once enormous, but now dwindled to a large village, with a decaying kremlin and a wonderful cathedral like a mosque, a blaze of beautiful ancient colour within, quite splendid in its gold and silver decorations, and the shrines of sixteen famous saints (the Greek saints are most puzzling) who are buried there, and whose mummified hands, left outside their cerecloths, are exposed to the kisses of the faithful. A journey of nineteen hours’ rail brought us here on Thursday morning. The first impression of Moscow is disappointing—commonplace omnibuses at the station, ugly vulgar streets like the back-streets of Brighton, and, as the town is above twenty miles round and nine miles across, they seem endless. But you enter the Chinese town, in which we are now living, by gates in the strangest walls imaginable, and the street has all the crowd and clamour of Naples. Another series of very tall battlemented red walls and lofty gates announces the Kremlin. This is more striking than I expected—the three mosque-like cathedrals (there are five cathedrals and three hundred churches in Moscow), and the splendid view from the high terrace in front of them, which recalls that from the Pincio at Rome, only the Moskva is a very broad river, and every church has the strangest of towers—like bulbs, pine-apples, melons, fir-cones, gilt or blue or brightest green, covered with network, with stars, discs, moons, hung with chains like veils, every device that the wildest dream or maddest imagination can invent, and yet in this clear atmosphere of intense burning heat and with the arid low hills or burnt plains which surround the town, it all looks right. Inside, the cathedrals put all the churches in Italy and Spain to shame by their splendour, but one is sorry not to know more of their history. I can speak enough Russian now to get on humbly; but the alphabet beats me still: it is not only that there are so many letters, but that the old familiar forms of written letters mean something new.”
