hen a child, all the more beautifully
would he sing when he grew older."

Those who are disposed to trace a hereditary descent in mental
qualifications, will find an instance to their purpose in the case of
Andersen. His mother, we are told, was utterly ignorant of books and of
the world, "but possessed a heart full of love!" From her he may be said
to have derived a singular frankness and amiability of disposition--a
fond, open, affectionate temper. For the more intellectual qualities, by
which this temper, through the medium of authorship, was to become
patent to the world, he must have been indebted to his father. This poor
and hapless shoemaker (such was his trade) seems to have been a singular
person. To use a favourite phrase of Napoleon, "he had missed his
destiny." His parents had been country people of some substance, but
misfortune falling upon misfortune had reduced them to poverty. Finally,
the father had become insane; the mother had been glad to obtain a
menial situation in the very asylum where her husband was confined; and
there was nothing better to be done for the son than to apprentice him
to a shoemaker. Some talk there was amongst the neighbours of raising a
subscription to send him to the grammar-school, and thus give him a
start in life; but it never went beyond talk. A shoemaker he became. But
to the leather and the last he never took kindly. He would read what
books he could get--Holberg's plays and the Bible--and ponder over them.
At first he would make his wife a sharer in his reflections, but as she,
good woman, never understood a word of what he said, he learned to
meditate in silence. On Sundays he would go out into the woods
accompanied only by his child; then he would sit down, sunk in
abstraction and solitary thought, while young Hans gathered flowers or
wild strawberries. "I recollect," says the son, in his Autobiography,
"that once, as a child, I saw tears in his eyes; and it was when a youth
from the grammar-school came to our house to be measured for a new pair
of boots, and showed us his books, and told us what he learned, 'That
was the path on which I ought to have gone!' said my father; he kissed
me passionately, and was silent the whole evening."

There surely went out of the world something still undeveloped in that
poor shoemaker. At a subsequent period of the history we find him fairly
abandoning his unchosen trade. The name of Napoleon resounded even in
Odense--even in Odens