We reach, finally, the "Red Square," so called because of the red Kremlin wall and the red group of houses at the entrance. We notice again that astonishment does not exactly make one brilliant. An "Ah!" in unison is all that escapes our lips. I believe that then I cried out with enthusiasm, and I should have liked to take by the coat-lapels the people who, used to the scene, were indifferently going their ways, and to say to them: "Look, you barbarians! Do you not know what you have here?" Vasili Blazhenny (the Basilius Cathedral)! Many times as one may have seen the curious bit of architecture depicted and dissected, yet when one finally stands before it and allows the gay towers, with their green, red, blue, and yellow cupolas to make their impression, he seems to have entered quite another world, which no longer has a single thing in common with our Western one. A sovereign, glorying fantasy has here been formed and created, apparently without rule, led only by the law of variety; has made wings, doors, and windings, and in the narrowest space unfolded a richness which strikes us dumb, much as our feeling for style struggles against the reversal of all our national laws. One's whole architectural sense leans towards clear relationship of parts, towards rhythm and proportion; the artist of the Basilius Cathedral leans towards intricacy, lack of rhythm, disproportion. He is a colorist, and but a colorist, in contrast to our Renaissance artists, to whom the color seems almost an injury to the delicate line. And yet in all this gay confusion he has held fast to a fundamental feeling which in all the variations keeps returning, as in a joint--yes, just as in the wildest dream some guiding idea like a red thread follows through it all. This motive--I could not help always calling it to myself the Tschibuk motive, after the winding, pearl-set tubes of a Turkish pipe--is carried out with every possible Indian, Persian, and Roman ingredient, and still retains the characteristic Byzantine style. A person would show great partiality to call this building a mad-house, as many an artist has done. One must only be able to free himself for an hour from the dictator of the old taste in order to be able to comprehend the delight of Ivan the Terrible at sight of this architectural orgy. (He gave expression to this delight by having the eyes of the architect put out in order that he might build no second masterpiece like it.) And then again it must be confessed that the task of uniting in narrow space thirteen chapels with thirteen towers could not well have been solved in any other way than in this apparently most untrammelled, fantastic one. If this proposition be accepted, the master of Vasili Blazhenny can only be the object of wonder.