boys, who made a butt of him, and
tortured him in the thousand ingenious ways known to their species. He
had no schooling to speak of; but, for all that, was haunted, like
Joseph, by dreams foreshadowing his future greatness. Guided by this
premonition he started, at the age of fourteen, for Copenhagen, a tall,
ugly, and ungainly lad, but resolved, somehow or other, to conquer fame
and honor. He tried himself as a dancer, singer, actor, and failed
lamentably in all his _debuts_. He could not himself estimate the extent
of his own ignorance, nor could he dream what a figure he was cutting.
Undismayed by all rebuffs, though suffering agony from his wounded
vanity, he wrote poems, comedies, and tragedies, in which he
plagiarized, more or less unconsciously, the elder Danish poets. Mr.
Jonas Collins, one of the directors of the Royal Theatre, became
interested in the youth, whose unusual ambition meant either madness or
genius. In order to determine which it might be, Mr. Collins induced
King Frederic VI. to pay for his education, and after half a dozen years
at school Hans Christian passed the entrance examination to the
University. Mr. Collins continued to assist him with counsel and deed;
and his hospitable house in Bredgade became a second home to Andersen.
There he met, for the first time, people of refinement and culture on
equal terms; and his morbid self-introspection was in a measure cured by
kindly association, tempered by wholesome fun and friendly criticism. He
now resolved to abandon his University studies and devote his life to
literature.

I have no doubt it would have alarmed the gentle poet very much, if he
had been told that he belonged to the Romantic School. To be classified
in literature and be bracketed with a lot of men with whom you are not
even on speaking terms, and whom, more than likely, you don't admire,
would have seemed to him an unpleasant prospect. That he drew much of
his inspiration from the German Romanticists, notably Heine and
Hoffmann, he would perhaps have admitted; but he would have thought it
unkind of you to comment upon his indebtedness. In his first book, "A
Pedestrian Tour from Holmen Canal to the Eastern Extremity of Amager"
(1829), he assumed by turns the _blase_ mask of the former and the
fantastically eccentric one of the latter; both of which ill became his
good-natured, plebeian, Danish countenance. For all that, the book was a
success in its day; and no less an authority