Not only the rigors of climate but the aspect of the outside world has a marked influence on character. Ovid in exile lamented having to live where the fields produced neither fruits nor sweet grapes; he might have added, had he lived in Russia, where the fields are all alike, where the eye encounters no variety to attract and please it. Castile is flat and monotonous like Russia, but there the sky compensates for the nakedness of the earth, and one cannot be sad beneath that canopy of turquoise blue. In Russia the dark firmament seems a leaden vault instead of a silken canopy, and oppresses the breast. The only things to diversify the immense expanse of earth are the great rivers and the broad belts or zones of the land, which may be divided into the northern, covered with forests; the _black lands_, which have been the granary of the empire from time immemorial; the arable steppes, so beautifully described by Gogol, like the American prairies, the land of the wild horses of the Russian heroic age; and lastly, the sandy steppes, sterile deserts only inhabited by the nomadic shepherds and their flocks. Throughout this vast body four large arteries convey the life-giving waters: the Dnieper which brought to Russia the culture of old Byzantium; the Neva, beside which sits the capital of its modern civilization; the Don, legendary and romantic; and the Volga, the great _Mother Volga_, the marvellous river, whose waters produce the most delicious fish in the world. Without the advantage of these rivers, whose abundance of waters is almost comparable to an ocean, the plains of Russia would be uninhabitable. Land, land everywhere, an ocean of land, a uniformity of soil, no rocks, no hills, so that stone is almost unknown in Russia. St. Petersburg was the first city not built entirely of wood, and it is an axiom, that Russian houses, as a rule, burn once in seven years. This dulness and desolation of Nature's aspect must of course influence brain and imagination, and consequently must be reflected in the literature, where melancholy predominates even in satire, and whence is derived a tendency to pessimism and a sort of religious devotion tinged with misery and sadness. Indolence, fatalism, inconstancy,--these are the defects of Russian character; resignation, patience, kindness, tolerance, humility, its better qualities. Its passive resignation may be readily transformed into heroism; and Count Léon Tolstoï, in his military narrative of the "Siege of Sevastopol," and his novel "War and Peace," studies and portrays in a wonderful way these traits of the national soul. IV. Russian History. History has been for Russia as inclement and hostile as Nature. A cursory glance will suffice to show this, and it is foreign to my purpose to devote more than slight attention to it.