was published in 1897.  Finally, in 1898, appeared ‘La Bonne Souffrance’.  In the last-mentioned work it would seem that the poet, just recovering from a severe malady, has returned to the dogmas of the Catholic Church, wherefrom he, like so many of his contemporaries, had become estranged when a youth.  The poems of 1902, ’Dans la Priere et dans la Lutte’, tend to confirm the correctness of this view.

Thanks to the juvenile Sarah Bernhardt, Coppee became, as before mentioned, like Byron, celebrated in one night.  This happened through the performance of ‘Le Passant’.

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.