ck of snow!
Yes, I would be a happy gem,
Like them to hang, to fade like them.
What more would thy Anacreon be?
Oh, anything that touches thee,
Nay, sandals for those airy feet--
Thus to be pressed by thee were sweet!

Moore's Translation.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN

(1805-1875)

BY BENJAMIN W. WELLS

The place of Hans Christian Andersen in literature is that of the
"Children's Poet," though his best poetry is prose. He was born in the
ancient Danish city of Odense, on April 2d, 1805, of poor and shiftless
parents. He had little regular instruction, and few childish associates.
His youthful imagination was first stimulated by La Fontaine's 'Fables'
and the 'Arabian Nights,' and he showed very early a dramatic instinct,
trying to act and even to imitate Shakespeare, though, as he says,
"hardly able to spell a single word correctly." It was therefore natural
that the visit of a dramatic company to Odense, in 1818, should fire his
fancy to seek his theatrical fortune in Copenhagen; whither he went in
September, 1819, with fifteen dollars in his pocket and a letter of
introduction to a danseuse at the Royal Theatre, who not unnaturally
took her strange visitor for a lunatic, and showed him the door. For
four years he labored diligently, suffered acutely, and produced nothing
of value; though he gained some influential friends, who persuaded the
king to grant him a scholarship for three years, that he might prepare
for the university.

Though he was neither a brilliant nor a docile pupil, he did not exhaust
the generous patience of his friends, who in 1829 enabled him to publish
by subscription his first book, 'A Journey on Foot from Holm Canal to
the East Point of Amager' a fantastic arabesque, partly plagiarized and
partly parodied from the German romanticists, but with a naivete that
might have disarmed criticism.

In 1831 there followed a volume of poems, the sentimental and rather
mawkish 'Fantasies and Sketches,' product of a journey in Jutland and of
a silly love affair. This book was so harshly criticized that he
resolved to seek a refuge and new literary inspiration in a tour to
Germany; for all through his life, traveling was Andersen's stimulus and
distraction, so that he compares himself, later, to a pendulum "bound
to go backward and forward, tic, toc, tic, toc, till the clock stops,
and down I lie."

[Illustration: HANS CHR. ANDERSEN.]

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