life in the rural parts of the Rhone region. It is singularly original.
Local color is its very essence. Its thought and action are strictly
circumscribed within the boundaries of the Crau and the Camargue, and
its originality consists in this limitation, in the fact that a poet of
this century has written a work that comes within the definition of an
epic, with all the primitive simplicity of Biblical or Classic writers,
without any agitation of the problems of modern life, without any new
thought or feeling concerning love or death, or man's relation to the
universe, using a dialect unknown at the time beyond the region
described. Its success could scarcely have been attained without the
poet's masterly prose translation, and yet it is evident that the poem
could not have been conceived and carried out in French verse. The
freshness, the artlessness, the lack of modernity, would have suffered
if the poet had bent his inspiration to the official language. Using a
new idiom, wherein he practically had no predecessor, he was free to
create expression as he went along, and was not compelled to cast his
thought in existing moulds.

The poem cannot place its author among the very great poets of the
world, if only because of this limitation. It lacks the breadth and
depth, the everlasting interest. But it is a work of great beauty, of
wonderful purity, a sweet story, told in lovely, limpid language, and
will cause many eyes to turn awhile from other lands to the sunny
landscapes of southern France.


II. CALENDAU. (CALENDAL.)

Mistral spent seven years in elaborating his second epic, as he did in
writing his first. The poem had not a popular success, and the reason