its folds;
     Or, turned into a fountain, lave
     Thy beauties in my circling wave;
     Or, better still, the zone that lies
     Warm to thy breast, and feels its sighs! 
     Or like those envious pearls that show
     So faintly round that neck 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.]

This German tour inspired his first worthy book, ‘Silhouettes,’ with some really admirable pages of description.  His success encouraged him to attempt the drama again, where he failed once more, and betook himself for relief to Paris and Italy, with a brief stay in the Jura Mountains, which is delightfully described in his novel, ‘O.T.’