Nature hath no surprise, No ambuscade of beauty 'gainst mine eyes From brake or lurking dell or deep defile; No humors, frolic forms--this mile, that mile; No rich reserves or happy-valley hopes Beyond the bends of roads, the distant slopes Her fancy fails, her wild is all run tame: Ever the same, the same. Oh might I through these tears But glimpse some hill my Georgia high uprears, Where white the quartz and pink the pebbles shine, The hickory heavenward strives, the muscadine Swings o'er the slope, the oak's far-falling shade Darkens the dogwood in the bottom-glade, And down the hollow from a ferny nook Bright leaps a living brook! SIDNEY LANIER. A DAY'S MARCH THROUGH FINLAND. "Why don't you go to Imatra?" asks my friend P---- as we lean over the side of the Peterhof steamer and watch the golden domes of St. Petersburg rising slowly from the dull gray level of the Gulf of Finland. "Now that you've seen a bit of Central Russia, that's the next thing for you to do. Go to Imatra, and I'll go too." "And where on earth _is_ Imatra?" ask I innocently. "Oh come! you don't mean to say you've never heard of Imatra? Why, everybody knows it. Let's go there next week." Nevertheless, it so happens that I have _not_ heard of Imatra--an ignorance probably shared by most people out of Russia, and perhaps not a few in it. But I am destined to a speedier acquaintance than I had anticipated with the famous waterfall (or "foss," as the natives call it), which, lying forty miles due north of the Finnish port of Viborg, close to the renowned "Saima Lake," attracts the amateur fishermen of St. Petersburg by scores every summer. The proposed trip comes at an auspicious moment, for St. Petersburg in July is as thoroughly a "city of the dead" as London in September or Chamouni in January; and the average tourist, having eaten cabbage-soup at Wolff's or Dominique's, promenaded the Nevski Prospect and bought photographs in the Gostinni-Dvor (the Russian Regent street and Burlington Arcade), witnessed a service in the Isaac Church, and perhaps gone on to Moscow to stare at the Kremlin and the Monster Bell, must either await the approach of winter or fall back upon the truly British consolation of being able to "say that he has been there." Then is the time for suburban or rural jaunts; for picnics at Peterhof and drives to Oranienbaum; for wandering through the gardens of Catherine II. at Tsarskoe-Selo ("Czar's Village") and eating curds and cream at Pavlovski; for surveying the monastery of Strelna or the batteries of Cronstadt; or, finally, for taking the advice of my roving friend and going to Imatra.