Denmark.
Through his means a grant was obtained from the royal purse, and access
procured to something like regular education in the grammar-school at
Slagelse. His place in the school was in the lowest class amongst little
boys. He knew indeed nothing at all--nothing of what is taught by the
pedagogue. At the age of eighteen, after having written a tragedy, which
had been submitted to the theatre at Copenhagen, and we know not what
poems besides,--after having versified a dance, and recited a song, he
begins at the very beginning, and seats himself down in the lowest form
of a grammar-school.

It is not our intention to pursue the biography of Andersen beyond what
is necessary for understanding the singular circumstances in which his
mind grew up; we shall not, therefore, detain our readers much longer on
this part of our subject. His scholastic progress appears to have been
at first slow and painful; the rector of the grammar-school behaved
neither kindly nor generously towards him; and on him he afterwards took
his revenge in the character of Habbas Dahdah, in "The Improvisatore."
But he was docile, he was persevering, and passed through the school,
and afterwards the college, not discreditably. In 1829, he was launched
again into the world, a member of the educated class of society.

After supporting himself some time by his pen, he received from his
government a stipend for travelling, which, it appears, in Denmark is
bestowed on young poets as well as artists. And now he started on his
travels--evidently the best school of education for a mind like his. For
whatever use books may have been of to Andersen, in teaching him to
_write_, they have had nothing to do with teaching him to _think_. No
one portion of his writings of any value can be traced to his
acquaintance with books. What knowledge he got from this source he could
never rightly use. What his eye saw, what his heart felt--that alone he
could work with. The slowly won reflection, the linked thought--any
thing like a train of reasoning, seems to have been an utter stranger
to his mind. Throughout his life, he is an observant child. From books
he can gather nothing: severe analytic thinking he knows nothing of; he
must see the world, must hear people talk, must remember how his own
heart beat, and thus only can he find something for utterance.

What a change now in his destiny! The poor shoemaker's child, that
wandered wild in the woods of Odense, and aft