Page:A Picture-book without Pictures and Other Stories (1848).djvu/15



regarded as the human being asserting in his own person the true nobility of mind and moral worth, or the man of genius, whose works alone have raised him from the lowest poverty and obscurity, to be an honored guest with kings and queens, Hans Christian Andersen is one of the most remarkable men of his day.

Like most men of great original talent, he is emphatically one of the people; and writing as he has done, principally of popular life, he describes what he himself has suffered and seen. Poverty or hardship, however, never soured his mind; on the contrary, whatever he has written is singularly genial, and abounds with the most kindly and universal sympathy. Human life, with all its Rh