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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
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