In the grottoes within the Caucasian icy mountains, which the bold glance of mortal has never spied, where the frost creates an eternal translucent vault and dulls the fall of the sun’s rays, where lightning is dead, where thunder is fettered, there stands, cut into ice, a mighty mansion. There are the storms, there are the cold, blizzards, tempests; there Winter reigns, devouring years. This austere sister of other days, though hoary, is swift and agile. Rival of Spring, Autumn and Summer, she is clad in the purple woven of snow; stark-frozen steam serves her as veil. Her throne has the form of a diamond mountain. Great pillars, of ice constructed, cast a silvery sheen, illumined by the sun; over the heavenly vault glides the solar splendour, and then it seems a mass of ice is on fire. The elements have no motion: the air dares not move, nor the fire glow. There are no coloured fields; among the fields of ice gleam only frozen flowery vapours; the waters in the heavens, melted by the rays, hang, petrified, in wavy layers; there in the air you may discern the words of prophecy, but all is stark, and nature dead. Only tremor, chill and frost have life; hoar frosts move about, while zephyrs grow dumb; snowstorms whirl about in flight, frosts reign in the place of summer luxury. There the ice represents the ruins of cities, one look at which congeals your blood. Pressed by the frosts, the snows there form silvery mounds and fields of diamonds. From there Winter spreads her dominion over us, devouring the grass in the fields, the flowers in the vales, and sucking up the living sap of trees, and on cold pinions bears frosts to us, driving day away, prolonging gloomy nights, and compelling the sun to turn aside his beaming eyes: with trembling, forests and rivers await her, and chills weave her shrouds from the white billows. Platón (in civil life Peter Geórgevich) Levshín. (1737-1812.) What Feofán Prokopóvich had been to the reign of Peter the Great, Platón was to Catherine II. After having studied in the Moscow Theological Academy, where he became a teacher even before ending his course, he took the tonsure at twenty-two; at twenty-five he was made rector of the Seminary. In the same year he attracted Catherine’s attention by an eloquent speech _On the Usefulness of Piety_, and he was at once called to St. Petersburg to be her son’s spiritual teacher (see p. 326). Platón rose rapidly, and in 1787 he was made metropolitan of Moscow. His liberal and enlightened views on theology were valued not only at home, but his _Brief Theology_, originally published in 1755, has been translated into most European languages, and three times into English. A Russian source informs us that his book on theology was made a text-book at Oxford and Cambridge. Several Englishmen who had visited him, and Dr. Stanley, spoke in the highest terms of this Russian divine.