THE CHURCH OF ST. ISAAC, ST. PETERSBURG. T. ISAAC'S CATHEDRAL, probably the finest church in Northern Europe, stands in the great square called Isaac's Place, which extends to the banks of the Neva. It occupies the site of a church originally built by Peter the Great, and dedicated to St. Isaac of Dalmatia, because the city of St. Petersburg was founded on the day sacred to him. Like nearly all of the Greek churches, it is in the form of a Greek cross, with four equal sides, and is surmounted with a cupola of copper overlaid with gold, supported by pillars of polished granite. Each of the four grand entrances is reached by three flights of granite steps, each entire flight chiselled from a single block. The four porticos have monolithic granite columns sixty feet in height, with Corinthian capitals in bronze. The magnificent proportions of this cathedral, the grand simplicity of its architecture and its imposing situation strike the visitor with awe as he approaches it from the side of the square facing the river. On the left is the Admiralty, its side six hundred and fifty feet in length, its front extending half a mile to the square of the Winter Palace; on the right, the Senate-House and the Holy Synod; and in its front is the colossal equestrian statue of Peter the Great. The interior of St. Isaac's is as remarkable for its magnificence of decoration as is the exterior for its grandeur and sublimity. Polished variegated marbles of every hue-all from the Russian dominions-splendid columns of malachite and of lapis-lazuli, gilded bronze-work and pictures and mosaics by Russian artists present a coup d'œil almost impossible to describe. The inmost shrine, presented by Mr. Demidoff, is valued at a million rubles. The Royal Door of the ikonastas, or screen, is of bronze, and is twenty-three feet in height by fifteen in breadth. To one accustomed to our plainer edifices of worship St. Isaac's appears to have an exuberance of decoration, but the grand ceremonial of the Greek Church demands corresponding surroundings. The cathedral is a comparatively new building even where everything is of the present, having been begun in 1819 by Alexander I., and consecrated in 1858 by Alexander II. Its foundation alone, of piles driven into the swampy soil, is said to have cost over a million dollars. It was built by M. Montferrand, a French architect, who erected also the great Alexander column. If he had never accomplished any other works, these two ought to immortalize his name. The equestrian statue of Peter the Great is one of the most noted monuments of Europe. The emperor is reining in his horse on the brink of a precipice, a serpent writhing under his charger's feet, being emblematic of the difficulties which beset the founder of Russia's greatness in the beginning. The block of granite which forms the pedestal weighs fifteen hundred tons, and was brought from J. F. LOUBAT. Lakhta, in Finland, four miles from the city. | architectural wonders convinces one that it The transportation of this immense monolith is little behind the more ancient capitals of to its present site was effected by Count Ma- Europe in beauty or in interesting associarino Carburis, a Greek engineer in the Russian tions. service, to whom Catherine II. entrusted the work. The stone, a detached mass of granite, lay embedded fifteen feet deep in a swamp. How to raise it from its position and convey it to St. Petersburg was a problem which daunted the ablest engineers. But Carburis invented a machine which overcame the mechanical difficulties, and under his superintendence it was safely shipped to the banks THE SANDS OF DEE. H, Mary, go and call the cattle home, And call the cattle home, of the Neva and moved thence by land to The western wind was wild and dank wi' its appointed site, where it was erected September 30, 1769. This was considered so wonderful an engineering feat that the apparatus with which it was effected was placed, at the request of the French government, in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, at Paris. The bronze statue, which is seventeen and a half feet in height, was the work of the celebrated French sculptor Étienne Maurice Falconet, who executed it in St. Petersburg in 1776 by order of Catherine II. It is considered his greatest work. The horse, which is rearing, is supported by the hinder legs and tail, the latter being ingeniously connected with a coil of the serpent, which is fastened firmly to the rock. St. Petersburg is a city of magnificent distances. Everything is on a large scale. It has broad streets, noble squares, long perspectives and grand monuments of art. Its only drawback is that it is built on a dead level, with no elevation to relieve the monotony or to give it picturesqueness. The splendor of its structures is thus in a measure hidden. But a more intimate acquaintance with its foam And all alone went she. The creeping tide came up along the sand, And round and round the sand, The blinding mist came down and hid the And never home came she. "Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair- O' drowned maiden's hair- They rowed her in across the rolling foam The cruel, crawling foam, Across the sands o' Dee. CHARLES KINGSLEY. HOMER. OMER is at least the name, if | proved an Asiatic Greek well versed in the nothing more, of the greatest dialect of his day and presenting in his two poet of antiquity-the first epics the best specimens of the highly cultiof the illustrious line of sing-vated Ionic. Thus the literary period is ers, or minstrels, who presented in two marvellous epics the language, the poetry, the history, the art and the beautiful mythology of Greece when the morning dews clustered upon her brow. The Iliad shows us a part of the siege of Troy, and the Odyssey tells the story of the wanderings of Odysseus, or Ulysses, from that siege to his home in the "little sea-girt isle of Ithaca." Of the period and personality of Homer there is great doubt. The Greek Lives of him are notoriously fictitious, and we are left to conjecture in a range of time from 1100 to 850 B. C. Herodotus, who lived about the middle of the fifth century before Christ, makes him the contemporary of Hesiod at the later date. Among the nine cities which have contended for the honor of giving him birth, Smyrna seems to have the strongest claim, if there be any valid claim: a local legend declares him to be the offspring of a river and a nymph; which may, indeed, be only a poetical way of eulogizing his Muse. In the latest period since the days of Wolf and Niebuhr a school of German critics has denied Homer's personality entirely, but English scholars have enlisted themselves on the other side, declaring him to be fixed, and internal evidence declares the identity of the poet. Against this view, the German scholars maintain that his poems are the work of many hands and the development of a long period; that for centuries they existed only in the memories and on the lips of rhapsodists, many of whom, being poets as well as reciters and contending for prizes at the games, would alter, improve and add to what they recited. To this it may be answered that there was a law of Athens requiring the Homeric poems to be read publicly-" with prompting "--whenever the festival of the Panathenæa, or festival in honor of Minerva, was celebrated. This law is at variance with the theory of the German critics. Again, the critics assert that Homer was only an eponym for the ancestor of the Homeridæ of Chios. Leaving the critics to disagree, the world is glad that it has these precious works, and that they had a chief author whom we are all satisfied to call Homer. His poems have been translated into all civilized languages. The principal versions in English are those of Chapman, Pope, Cowper, Earl Derby and William Cullen Bryant. While, perhaps, all the others are nearer to the Greek in delicate points of scholarship, the delightful tinkling of Pope's pentameter couplet has caused it to be the most popular. |