The starting-point of this art is personification.  To the child’s fancy the doll is as much alive as the cat, the broom as the bird, and even the letters in the copy-book can stretch themselves.  On this foundation he builds myths that tease by a certain semblance of rationality,—­elegiac, more often sentimental, but at their best, like normal children, without strained pathos or forced sympathy.

Such personification has obvious dramatic and lyric elements; but Andersen lacked the technique of poetic and dramatic art, and marred his prose descriptions, both in novels and books of travel, by an intrusive egotism and lyric exaggeration.  No doubt, therefore, the most permanent part of his work is that which popular instinct has selected, the ‘Picture Book without Pictures,’ the ‘Tales and Stories’; and among these, those will last longest that have least of the lyric and most of the dramatic element.

Nearly all of Andersen’s books are translated in ten uniform but unnumbered volumes, published by Houghton, Mifflin and Company.  Of the numerous translations of the ‘Tales,’ Mary Howitt’s (1846) and Sommer’s (1893) are the best, though far from faultless.

The ‘Life of Hans Christian Andersen’ by R. Nisbet Bain (New York, 1895) is esteemed the best.

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THE STEADFAST TIN SOLDIER

From ‘Collected Fairy Tales,’ newly translated

There were once twenty-five tin soldiers, who were all brothers, for they were cast out of one old tin spoon.  They held their muskets, and their faces were turned to the enemy; red and blue, ever so fine, were the uniforms.  The first thing they heard in this world, when the cover was taken from the box where they lay, were the words, “Tin soldiers!” A little boy shouted it, and clapped his hands.  He had got them because it was his birthday, and now he set them up on the table.  Each soldier was just like the other, only one was a little different.  He had but one leg, for he had been cast last, and there was not enough tin.  But he stood on his one leg just as firm as the others on two, so he was just the one to be famous.

On the table where they were set up stood a lot of other playthings; but what caught your eye was a pretty castle of paper.  Through the little windows you could see right into the halls.  Little trees stood in front, around a bit of looking-glass which was meant for a lake.  Wax swans swam on it and were reflected in it.  That was all very pretty, but still the prettiest thing was a little girl who stood right in the castle gate.  She was cut out of paper too, but she had a silk dress, and a little narrow blue ribbon across her shoulders, on which was a sparkling star as big as her whole face.  The little girl lifted her arms gracefully in the air, for she was a dancer; and then she lifted one leg so high that the tin soldier could not find it at all, and thought that she had only one leg, just like himself.