In 1869 he celebrated his literary jubilee.  In 1872 he finished his last ‘Stories.’  That year he met with an accident in Innsbruck from which he never recovered.  Kind friends eased his invalid years; and so general was the grief at his illness that the children of the United States collected a sum of money for his supposed necessities, which at his request took the form of books for his library.  A few months later, after a brief and painless illness, he died, August 1st, 1875.  His admirers had already erected a statue in his honor, and the State gave him a magnificent funeral; but his most enduring monument is that which his ‘Wonder Tales’ are still building all around the world.

The character of Andersen is full of curious contrasts.  Like the French fabulist, La Fontaine, he was a child all his life, and often a spoiled child; yet he joined to childlike simplicity no small share of worldly wisdom.  Constant travel made him a shrewd observer of detail, but his self-absorption kept him from sympathy with the broad political aspirations of his generation.

In the judgment of his friends and critics, his autobiographical ’Story of My Life’ is strangely unjust, and he never understood the limitations of his genius.  He was not fond of children, nor personally attractive to them, though his letters to them are charming.

In personal appearance he was limp, ungainly, awkward, and odd, with long lean limbs, broad flat hands, and feet of striking size.  His eyes were small and deep-set, his nose very large, his neck very long; but he masked his defects by studied care in dress, and always fancied he looked distinguished, delighting to display his numerous decorations on his evening dress in complacent profusion.

On Andersen’s style there is a remarkably acute study by his fellow-countryman Brandes, in ‘Kritiker og Portraite’ (Critiques and Portraits), and a useful comment in Boyesen’s ‘Scandinavian Literature.’  When not perverted by his translators, it is perhaps better suited than any other to the comprehension of children.  His syntax and rhetoric are often faulty; and in the ‘Tales’ he does not hesitate to take liberties even with German, if he can but catch the vivid, darting imagery of juvenile fancy, the “ohs” and “ahs” of the nursery, its changing intonations, its fears, its smiles, its personal appeals, and its venerable devices to spur attention and kindle sympathy.  Action, or imitation, takes the place of description.  We hear the trumpeter’s taratantara and “the pattering rain on the leaves, rum dum dum, rum dum dum,” The soldier “comes marching along, left, right, left, right.”  No one puts himself so wholly in the child’s place and looks at nature so wholly with his eyes as Andersen.  “If you hold one of those burdock leaves before your little body it’s just like an apron, and if you put it on your head it’s almost as good as an umbrella, it’s so big.”  Or he tells you that when the sun shone on the flax, and the clouds watered it, “it was just as nice for it as it is for the little children to be washed and then get a kiss from mother:  that makes them prettier; of course it does.”  And here, as Brandes remarks, every right-minded mamma stops and kisses the child, and their hearts are warmer for that day’s tale.