To the right and the left of the Admiralty stretch the great squares upon which stand the principal public edifices and monuments of the capital; the Winter Palace, with its six thousand constant occupants; the _Hotel de l’Etat Major_, whence go forth orders to a million of soldiers, the Senate House, and the Palace of the Holy Synod, the centres of temporal and spiritual law for the hundred nations blended into the Russian Empire; the Church of St. Isaac, with its four porticoes, the lofty columns of which, sixty feet in height, are each of a single block of granite, and the walls of polished marble; its cupola covered with copper overlaid with gold, gleaming like another sun, surmounted by a golden cross, and forming the most conspicuous object to the approaching visitor, whether he comes up the Gulf, or across the dreary Finnish marshes; yet, high as it rises in the air, it sinks scarcely a less distance below the ground, so deep was it necessary to drive into the marsh the forest of piles upon which it rests, before a firm foundation could be secured. Here is the Statue of Peter—the finest equestrian statue in the world—reining his steed upon the brink of the precipice up which he has urged it, his hand stretched out in benediction toward the Neva, the pride of his new-founded city. Here is the triumphal column to Alexander, “the Restorer of Peace,” the whole elevation of which is 150 feet, measuring to the head of the angel who—the cross victorious over the crescent—bears the symbol of the Christian faith above the capital cast from cannon captured from the Turks. The shaft is a single block eighty-four feet in height—the largest single stone erected in modern times; and it would have been still loftier had it not been for the blind unreasoning obedience to orders, so characteristic of the Russian. When the column had been determined upon, orders were dispatched to the quarries to detach, if possible, a single block for the shaft of the length of eighty-four feet, though with scarcely a hope that the attempt would succeed. One day a dispatch was received by the Czar from the superintendent, with the tidings that a block had been detached, free from flaw, one hundred feet long; but that he was about to proceed to reduce it to the required length. The sovereign mounted in hot haste to save the block from mutilation, and to preserve a column so much exceeding his hopes. But he was too late; and arrived just in time to see the sixteen feet severed from the block, which would otherwise have been the noblest shaft in the world. The length of these public places, open and in full view, right and left, from the Admiralty tower, is a full mile.