a more simple pathos than _L'Epave?_--that story of a sailor's son whom
the widowed mother strives vainly to keep from the cruel waves that
killed his father. (It is worthy of a parenthesis that although the ship
M. Coppee loves best is that which sails the blue shield of the City of
Paris, he knows the sea also, and he depicts sailors with affectionate
fidelity.) But whether at the sea-side by chance, or more often in the
streets of the city, the poet seeks out for the subject of his story
some incident of daily occurrence made significant by his
interpretation; he chooses some character common-place enough, but made
firmer by conflict with evil and by victory over self. Those whom he
puts into his poems are still the humble, the forgotten, the neglected,
the unknown; and it is the feelings and the struggles of these that he
tells us, with no maudlin sentimentality, and with no dead set at our
sensibilities. The sub-title Mrs. Stowe gave to _Uncle Tom's Cabin_
would serve to cover most of M. Coppee's _contes_ either in prose or
verse; they are nearly all pictures of _life among the lowly_. But there
is no forcing of the note in his painting of poverty and labor; there is
no harsh juxtaposition of the blacks and the whites. The tone is always
manly and wholesome.

_La Marchande de Journaux_ and the other little masterpieces of
story-telling in verse are unfortunately untranslatable, as are all
poems but a lyric or two, now and then, by a happy accident. A
translated poem is a boiled strawberry, as some one once put it
brutally. But the tales which M. Coppee has written in prose--a true
poet's prose, nervous, vigorous, flexible, and firm--these can be
Englished by taking thought and time and pains, without which a
translation is always a betrayal. Ten of these tales have been rendered
into English by Mr. Learned; and the ten chosen for translation are
among the best of the two score and more of M. Coppee's _contes en
prose_. These ten tales are fairly representative of his range and
variety. Compare, for example, the passion in "The Foster Sister," pure,
burning and fatal, with the Black Forest _naivete_ of "The Sabots of
Little Wolff." Contrast the touching pathos of "The Substitute,"
poignant in his magnificent self-sacrifice, by which the man who has
conquered his shameful past goes back willingly to the horrible life he
has fled from that he may save from a like degradation and from an
inevitable moral decay the one