The fascination of this wonder-church must be of the same order. Brilliant beauty, the sad gaiety of madness, the cloud of a cruel tragedy—these make up its story. Memory is like a lute strung with all manner of strange chords. The Church of St. Vassili touched one of them. The Kremlin is the diadem of the river Moskva as Windsor Castle is the diadem of the Thames. It has its psychological moment, like “fair Melrose.” For the one it is the “pale moonlight,” for the other if you would “see it aright,” crossing the river, you must go to the Sparrows’ Hill at sunset, and stand where Napoleon stood, waiting in vain for the keys of the gates of the citadel to be brought to him; and if you have the luck that I had, to hit upon a glorious setting sun, you will have a sight that will remain with you till your dying day. No skill of painter could convey the faintest idea of its strange beauty, varying as it does from minute to minute; bathed in a flood of golden sunshine, the flame-coloured walls and towers and grotesquely-shaped steeples and belfries of the Kremlin are a blaze of burnished metal, like the crown of some huge Gargantuan hero; then, as the sun lowers on the horizon, they begin, like the dying dolphins of fable, to flash out chameleon tints of all the colours of the rainbow; gradually the rosy pink steals over them, just as it does over the snowy points of the high Alps, fading into the cold violet—not the darkness—of a night almost as luminous as day, against which the sharp lines stand out with a severity altogether foreign to their fantastic beauty. The chill serenity of a nightless night gives a new aspect to the barbaric splendour of the mighty citadel. For the moment the stilly peace casts a holy spell even over the memory of Ivan the Terrible.