even with German, if he can but catch the vivid, darting imagery of
juvenile fancy, the "ohs" and "ahs" of the nursery, its changing
intonations, its fears, its smiles, its personal appeals, and its
venerable devices to spur attention and kindle sympathy. Action, or
imitation, takes the place of description. We hear the trumpeter's
_taratantara_ and "the pattering rain on the leaves, _rum dum dum, rum
dum dum_," The soldier "comes marching along, _left, right, left,
right_." No one puts himself so wholly in the child's place and looks at
nature so wholly with his eyes as Andersen. "If you hold one of those
burdock leaves before your little body it's just like an apron, and if
you put it on your head it's almost as good as an umbrella, it's so
big." Or he tells you that when the sun shone on the flax, and the
clouds watered it, "it was just as nice for it as it is for the little
children to be washed and then get a kiss from mother: that makes them
prettier; of course it does." And here, as Brandes remarks, every
right-minded mamma stops and kisses the child, and their hearts are
warmer for that day's tale.

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