King Magnus was, at his zenith of power, one of the mightiest monarchs in Europe, having under his rule the entire Scandinavian peninsula and Finland, a realm stretching from the sound at Elsinore to the Polar Sea, from the river Neva to Iceland and Greenland.

I don't think that I had ever before realised the power of the Neva at such close quarters.

The next night I was woke by a slap which shook the Neva from stem to stern, and made her stagger and writhe like a live thing struck across the loins.

There is an old poem of Pushkin's that Alexandre Benois has most marvellously illustrated, which has for its theme the rising of the river Neva in November 1824.

I watched the Nevski, and saw how it slipped into the Neva with the Red Square on one side of it, and S. Isaac's Square on the other, and the great station at the far end of it, and about these two lines the Neva and the Nevski, the whole town sprawled and crept, ebbed and flowed.