its waters, or the railroads poured up their smoke along its banks.
Although the poet has interwoven in it a tale of merest fancy, it is
essentially realistic, differing notably in this respect from Calendau.
This realism descends to the merest details, and the poetic quality of
the work suffers considerably in many passages. The poet does not shrink
from minute enumeration of cargoes, or technical description of boats,
or word-for-word reproduction of the idle talk of boatwomen, or the
apparently inexhaustible profanity of the boatmen. The life on the river
is vividly portrayed, and we put down the book with a sense of really
having made the journey from Lyons to Beaucaire with the fleet of seven
boats of Master Apian.

On opening the volume the reader is struck first of all with the novel
versification. It is blank verse, the line being precisely that of
Dante's _Divina Commedia_. Not only is there no rhyme, but assonance is
very carefully avoided. The effect of this unbroken succession of
feminine verses is slightly monotonous, though the poet shifts his
pauses skilfully. The rhythm of the lines is marked, the effect upon the
ear being quite like that of English iambic pentameters hypercatalectic.
The absence of rhyme is the more noteworthy in that rhyme offers little
difficulty in Provençal. Doubtless the poet was pleased to show an
additional claim to superiority for his speech over the French as a
vehicle for poetic thought; for while on the one hand the rules of rhyme
and hiatus give the poet writing in Provençal less trouble than when
writing in French, on the other hand this poem proves that splendid
blank verse may be written in the new language.

The plan of the poem is briefly as follows: it describes the departure
of a fleet of boats from Lyons, accompanies them down the river to
Beaucaire, describes the fair and the return up the river, the boats