of value; though he gained some influential friends, who persuaded the
king to grant him a scholarship for three years, that he might prepare
for the university.

Though he was neither a brilliant nor a docile pupil, he did not exhaust
the generous patience of his friends, who in 1829 enabled him to publish
by subscription his first book, 'A Journey on Foot from Holm Canal to
the East Point of Amager' a fantastic arabesque, partly plagiarized and
partly parodied from the German romanticists, but with a naïveté that
might have disarmed criticism.

In 1831 there followed a volume of poems, the sentimental and rather
mawkish 'Fantasies and Sketches,' product of a journey in Jutland and of
a silly love affair. This book was so harshly criticized that he
resolved to seek a refuge and new literary inspiration in a tour to
Germany; for all through his life, traveling was Andersen's stimulus and
distraction, so that he compares himself, later, to a pendulum "bound
to go backward and forward, tic, toc, tic, toc, till the clock stops,
and down I lie."

[Illustration: HANS CHR. ANDERSEN.]

This German tour inspired his first worthy book, 'Silhouettes,' with
some really admirable pages of description. His success encouraged him
to attempt the drama again, where he failed once more, and betook
himself for relief to Paris and Italy, with a brief stay in the Jura
Mountains, which is delightfully described in his novel, 'O.T.'

Italy had on him much the same clarifying effect that it had on Goethe;
and his next book, the novel 'Improvisatore' (1835), achieved and