Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/715

Rh no one could have ridiculed it who boasted any heart or the faintest sense of humour.

He had no power of enduring physical pain, or any notion that it was undignified to bemoan himself. He would talk to his friends of every ailment and sensation with quite pathetic earnestness. To see Andersen rub his stomach slowly and heavily, while he explained, "I was bad all the night, and when the pain came I asked the good God to take me away, but when it went I thought I should like to live," and to hear him gravely repeat the gesture with the statement to each comer, was the funniest thing possible. Every one listened and sympathized with profound respect. He ran a thorn into his finger one day, and not only did he cry, throw himself about, and finally scream when it had to be taken out with a needle, but he declined to eat dinner, and so completely took it for granted that nobody else could eat any, that nobody did, and the meal was not even served. When the thorn had been extracted, he wept with joy, and sat for hours holding the little instrument of torture between his finger and thumb, exhibiting it to all new-comers, and expatiating on his sufferings. Suddenly he coughed, and missed the thorn. Impossible to persuade him it had not flown into his mouth and been swallowed. "Will it be as sore here as it was here?" he asked mournfully, touching his stomach and his finger alternately.

His marvellous simplicity extended to every affair of life. He, who made many rich, was poor himself. His books brought him very little; the tiny pension allowed him by the State and his free stall at the theatre constituted his wealth. But he never thought of money; in that, too, he had all a child's perfect trustfulness. Some spirited attempts were made to marry him; one, in particular, by a handsome peasant-girl, who wrote him a love-letter, and took it to him herself. When he had read it, she urged her cause in words, — "I would be so good to you," she said; "I would take such care of you." — "I don't doubt it," he replied; "but, my good girl, I don't want to be married." He had a grand passion, he used to say, once, and it was enough for all his life; and then he would weave some of his purest, brightest, most beautiful and graceful fancies round the image of — Jenny Lind.

Some mysterious affinity existed between him and the flower-world. He would handle flowers and whisper to them, and they would take wondrous combinations at the bidding of his big, flat fingers. When he held flowers, or presented them, he became almost graceful, and he had a floral language all his own. A quick observer might trace Andersen's reading of character, or rather the revelation of his true child-instinct, in the flowers which he would present to the ladies whom he selected for this coveted honour.

He sleeps well in the city which loved and honoured him so truly, whose everyday life is full of him and of associations with him, whose every familiar object has been lent new meaning by his extraordinary fancy, and his simple, trustful, childlike heart. His memory will be kept green throughout a long period of remembrance, by plentiful traditions of one whose character was as unique as his genius.

 

 