were more Teuton than the Prussians.  If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the Prussians were descended from mongrel Slavonic savages.  If Protestantism be progress, the Danes were Protestant; while they had attained quite peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive cultivation which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands.  They had in a quite arresting degree what was claimed for the Germanics as against Latin revolutionism:  quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple love of fields and of the sea.  But, moreover, by that coincidence which dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epoch had found their freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the works of a Danish man of genius, whose stories and sketches were so popular in England as almost to have become English.  Good as Grimm’s Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern German; they were a museum of things older than any nation, of the dateless age of once-upon-a-time.  When the English romantics wanted to find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost comically crowded.  There they found what we call an original writer, who was nevertheless the image of the origins.  They found a whole fairyland in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat.  Those of the English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard.  His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward allegory:  it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are.  Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like a wooden horse.  Through him children and the happier kind of men did feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to utter welcome.  In the story of “The Fir Tree” he transplanted to England a living bush that can still blossom into candles.  And in his tale of “The Tin Soldier” he uttered the true defence of romantic militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery.  He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of larger and lower things.  These things, alas, were an allegory.  When Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and