Road from Kiow to Moscow.

About nine hundred versts still separated Kiow from Moscow.  My Russian coachmen drove me along like lightning, singing airs, the words of which I was told were compliments and encouragements to their horses, “Go along,” they said, “my friends:  we know one another:  go quick.”  I have as yet seen nothing at all barbarous in this people; on the contrary their forms have an elegance and softness about them which you find no where else.  Never does a Russian coachman pass a female, of whatever age or rank she may be, without saluting her, and the female returns it by an inclination of the head which is always noble and graceful.  An old man who could not make himself understood by me, pointed to the earth, and then to the heaven, to signify to me, that the one would shortly be to him the road to the other.  I know very well that the shocking barbarities which disfigure the history of Russia may be urged, reasonably, as evidence of a contrary character; but these I should rather lay to the charge of the boyars, the class which was depraved by the despotism which it exercised or submitted to, than to the nation itself.  Besides, political dissentions, everywhere and at all times, distort national character, and there is nothing more deplorable than that succession of masters, whom crimes have elevated or overturned; but such is the fatal condition of absolute power on this earth.  The civil servants of the government, of an inferior class, all those who look to make their fortune by their suppleness or intrigues, in no degree resemble the inhabitants of the country, and I can readily believe all the ill that has been and may be said of them; but to appreciate properly the character of a warlike nation, we must look to its soldiers, and the class from which its soldiers are taken, the peasantry.

Although I was driven along with great rapidity, it seemed to me that I did not advance a step, the country was so extremely monotonous.  Plains of sand, forests of birch tree, and villages at a great distance from each other, composed of wooden houses all built upon the same plan:  these were the only objects that my eyes encountered.  I felt that sort of nightmare which sometimes seizes one during the night, when you think you are always marching and never advancing.  The country appeared to me like the image of infinite space, and to require eternity to traverse it.  Every instant you met couriers passing, who went along with incredible swiftness; they were seated on a wooden bench placed across a little cart drawn by two horses, and nothing stopped them for a moment.  The jolting of their carriage sometimes made them spring two feet above it, but they fell with astonishing address, and made haste to call out in Russian, forward, with an energy similar to that of the French on a day of battle.  The Sclavonian language is singularly echoing; I should almost say there is something metallic about it; you would think you heard a bell striking, when the Russians pronounce certain letters of their alphabet, quite different from those which compose the dialects of the West.