I have given no account of our various journeys in Russia, as it would be merely a repetition of the same terms, in which forest, sand, and morass would figure as the leading objects, and would indeed be only wearisome to the reader. Not but that there are some pretty places here and there, but they are very wide apart, and the trouble of wading through two or three hundred versts of monotonous travels over the unchanging post-roads would be but ill repaid by being told that on such a spot stands such a town or such a village, the name of which is never heard beyond the frontiers of the province in which it is situated, and which possesses no interest whatever for any one but the traveller himself, who in journeying through the country is apt to hail the sight of an inhabited place with much the same feeling as he who in making a voyage across the ocean welcomes the appearance of a strange ship in the offing: so inconceivably wearying is the constant view of the endless tracts of forest-land and waste. Descriptions of provincial towns would be almost as tiresome as those of pine-woods and marshes; the same style of houses, the same kind of churches with green roofs and gilt domes; the streets badly paved, or rather unpaved; the same unvarying background of firs and sky—in fact “_sameness all_.” Besides all these objections to a detailed account, so many descriptions have already been published, that the road from St. Petersburg to Moscow must be almost as well known as that from London to York. Nothing perhaps is more striking to a foreigner travelling through Russia than the utter want of animation in the people; there are no merry laughs ringing joyously on the ear from some light-hearted maiden; no lively bustle at the post-stations when the diligence stops to change horses, such as was seen on similar occasions when stage-coaches ran on the level roads of England, when the arrival of the London mail caused quite an excitement in the village. The sound of songs may be everywhere heard, it is true; but they can scarcely be called joyful ones—they are almost always sad and mournful, being in the minor key; their melancholy cadences, as a French writer remarks, “might be said each to contain a tear.” The peasants’ downcast looks and inexpressive faces—their cowed manner, as if they were shrinking from an uplifted lash—the want of intelligence which the absence of civilization causes in their countenance, give them an almost brutish appearance, and cause a painful sensation in the stranger’s heart. Even the cattle seem to want that air of life which makes our fields and meadows so gay; there are no snowy flocks and frisking lambs, no shepherd’s dog with joyous bark, no robin on the flowery thorn: it is, as my friend remarked, not the “repose of the living,” but the “slumber of the dead,” that reigns over the land of Muscovy.