were untranslatable; that nothing could be subtracted from them, and that still less could anything be added; one ray the more, one shade the less, you would think, would certainly impair their nameless grace. But what does Krylov do? He re-creates the situation, expanding La Fontaine's first line into six lines, makes it his own, and stamps on it the impress of his personality and his nationality. Here is a literal translation of the Russian, in rhyme. (I am not ambitiously trying a third English version.) "Two pigeons lived like sons born of one mother. Neither would eat nor drink without the other; Where you see one, the other's surely near, And every joy they halved and every tear; They never noticed how the time flew by, They sighed, but it was not a weary sigh." This gives the sense of Krylov's poem word for word, except for what is the most important touch of all in the last line. The trouble is that Krylov has written six lines which are as untranslatable as La Fontaine's four; and he has made them as profoundly Russian as La Fontaine's are French. Nothing could be more Russian than the last line, which it is impossible to translate; because it should run-- "They were sometimes sad, but they never felt _ennui_"-- literally, "it was never _boring_ to them." The difficulty is that the word for _boring_ in Russian, _skuchno_, which occurs with the utmost felicity in contradistinction to _sad_, _grustno_, cannot be rendered in English in its poetical simplicity. There are no six lines more tender, musical, wistful, and subtly poetical in the whole of Russian literature.