As interludes to the plays there are “occasional” theatrical pieces, written for the fiftieth anniversary of the performance of ‘Hernani’ or the two-hundredth anniversary of the foundation of the “Comedie Francaise.” This is a wide field, indeed, which M. Coppee has cultivated to various purposes. Take Coppee’s works in their sum and totality, and the world-decree is that he is an artist, and an admirable one. He plays upon his instrument with all power and grace. But he is no mere virtuoso. There is something in him beyond the executant. Of Malibran, Alfred de Musset says, most beautifully, that she had that “voice of the heart which alone has power to reach the heart.” Here, also, behind the skilful player on language, the deft manipulator of rhyme and rhythm, the graceful and earnest writer, one feels the beating of a human heart. One feels that he is giving us personal impressions of life and its joys and sorrows; that his imagination is powerful because it is genuinely his own; that the flowers of his fancy spring spontaneously from the soil. Nor can I regard it as aught but an added grace that the strings of his instrument should vibrate so readily to what is beautiful and unselfish and delicate in human feeling. JOSE DE HEREDIA de l’Academie Francaise. A ROMANCE OF YOUTH BOOK 1. CHAPTER I. ON THE BALCONY As far back as Amedee Violette can remember, he sees himself in an infant’s cap upon a fifth-floor balcony covered with convolvulus; the child was very small, and the balcony seemed very large to him. Amedee had received for a birthday present a box of water-colors, with which he was sprawled out upon an old rug, earnestly intent upon his work of coloring the woodcuts in an odd volume of the ‘Magasin Pittoresque’, and wetting his brush from time to time in his mouth. The neighbors in the next apartment had a right to one-half of the balcony. Some one in there was playing upon the piano Marcailhou’s Indiana Waltz, which was all the rage at that time. Any man, born about the year 1845, who does not feel the tears of homesickness rise to his eyes as he turns over the pages of an old number of the ‘Magasin Pittoresque’, or who hears some one play upon an old piano Marcailhou’s Indiana Waltz, is not endowed with much sensibility. When the child was tired of putting the “flesh color” upon the faces of all the persons in the engravings, he got up and went to peep through the railings of the balustrade. He saw extending before him, from right to left, with a graceful curve, the Rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, one of the quietest streets in the Luxembourg quarter, then only half built up. The branches of the trees spread over the wooden fences, which enclosed gardens so silent and tranquil that passers by could hear the birds singing in their cages. It was a September afternoon, with a broad expanse of pure sky across which large clouds, like mountains of silver, moved in majestic slowness.