could eat cakes and sweets, and drink punch _ad libitum_, and
where the angels sat around raving about his poetry, was probably not so
very remote from Andersen's actual conception. His world was the child's
world, in which there is but one grand division into good and bad, and
the innumerable host that occupies the middle-ground between these poles
is ignored. Those who praised what he wrote were good people; those who
ridiculed him were a malignant and black-hearted lot whom he was very
sorry for and would include in his prayers, in the hope that God might
make them better.

We may smile at this simple system; but we all remember the time when we
were addicted to a similar classification. That it is a sign of
immaturity of intellect is undeniable; and in Andersen's case it is one
of the many indications that intellectually he never outgrew his
childhood. He never possessed the power of judgment that we expect in a
grown-up man. His opinions on social and political questions were
_naive_ and quite worthless. And yet, in spite of all these limitations,
he was a poet of rare power; nay, I may say in consequence of them. The
vitality which in other authors goes toward intellectual development,
produced in him strength and intensity of imagination. Everything which
his fancy touched it invested with life and beauty. It divined the
secret soul of bird and beast and inanimate things. His hens and ducks
and donkeys speak as hens and ducks and donkeys would speak if they
could speak. Their temperaments and characters are scrupulously
respected. Even shirt-collars, gingerbread men, darning-needles,
flowers, and sunbeams, he endowed with physiognomies and speech, fairly
consistent with their ruling characteristics. This personification,
especially of inanimate objects, may at first appear arbitrary; but it
is part of the beautiful consistency of Andersen's genius that it never
stoops to mere amusing and fantastic trickery. The character of the
darning-needle is the character which a child would naturally attribute
to a darning-needle, and the whole multitude of vivid personifications
which fills his tales is governed by the same consistent but dimly
apprehended instinct. Of course, I do not pretend that he was conscious
of any such consistency; creative processes rarely are conscious. But
he needed no reflection in order to discover the child's view of its own
world. He never ceased to regard the world from the child's point of