"My life," said Hans Andersen in his serene old age, "is a lovely story, happy and full of incident. If, when I was a boy, and went forth into the world poor and friendless, a good fairy had met me and said, 'Choose now thine own course through life, and the object for which thou wilt strive, and then, according to the development of thy mind, and as reason requires, I will guide and defend thee to its attainment,' my fate could not, even then, have been directed more happily, more prudently, or better. The history of my life will say to the world what it says to me, 'There is a loving God, who directs all things for the best.'"

In its vicissitudes, its hardships, its triumphs that life was a fairy tale come true. The fourteen-year-old boy who came gawking into Copenhagen in 1819, clad in the confirmation suit that a small-town tailoress had made for him from his dead father's old overcoat, lived to be the man who could ride in the king's carriage when he wished to—once he made that wish known to his good-natured sovereign and it was granted—lived, also, to be the man whom almost every literary notable who visited Copenhagen during a period of forty years sought out and paid homage.

All that story this man wrote out in his old age in the most ingenuous and complacent spirit, and it is because of its spirit that his book is an authentic document among the world's masterpieces of autobiography. It has a right to a place on the shelf with the autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini, Colley Cibber, Benjamin Franklin and Herbert Spencer. It is different from all those, lacking the excitement and shamelessness of Cellini's book, the spice of Cibber's, the pithiness of Franklin's and the wisdom of Mr. Spencer's, but it is an interesting narrative and important psychology because it is complete self-revelation by a man of genius. Such documents are of great value and of the greatest entertainment, and when one outgrows Hans Andersen's fairy tales, one still does not lose touch with Hans Andersen. The guileless, candid old man of The Story of My Life remains a friend whom one likes to hear purling on—and on—and on.

Thus the book of the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen becomes one of the important lure-books. A child once introduced to the tales will soon come upon the lovely one called "The Ugly Duckling," and if his reading is being guided by an elder who knows something about anything the child may be so fortunate as to learn that the tale of the ugly duckling is a parable on Hans Andersen's life, with pages of autobiography crowded into it….

In the fifth line of "The Ugly Duckling" we are introduced in two and a half lines to the stork who "was walking around on his long red legs and talking Egyptian, because he had learned that language from his mother." When children grow old enough to be improved by prefaces they are not unlikely to be told that those two and a half lines about the stork and his talk are among the most characteristic of Hans Andersen's fleeting, unexpected touches by which, in a way that seems quite matter-of-fact but that is essentially poetic and delicate, he establishes poetic kinship between his readers and the creatures of his fancy.

Well, the stork was talking Egyptian, for the reason which you know now, and "the corn was yellow, the oats were green, the hay stood in stacks down in the green meadows, and … right in the sunshine lay an old manor, surrounded by deep canals, and from the wall down to the water grew big burdock leaves, so high that little children could stand upright under the tallest of them. It was just as wild there as in the thickest wood."

Children accept the first page of "The Ugly Duckling" as rather usual kind of writing, so easily does it move along, and so quietly does the picture it makes take shape before their eyes. No straining for an effect, no pretentiousness in it. But I suspect that such writing, with the wealth of soft color that it carries, is not easy, for if it were there would be more of it—the world so likes it and so treasures it.

Amid the sweet scene the Ugly Duckling was hatched—hatched into a world of trouble and snubs and unkind criticism, and of fun-making in which the source of the laughter was the pain it caused. Just such a world did Hans Andersen encounter when he, with ten Danish rigsdalers in a pocket of his confirmation suit, came to Copenhagen from the thriving manufacturing town of Odense, where in 1805 he was born.

"I think I will go out into the wide world," the Ugly Duckling had said. Hans Andersen had said that also. The Ugly Duckling saw the swans—"had never before seen anything so beautiful … dazzlingly white, they uttered a very strange cry, spread their large splendid wings and … mounted so high that the ugly little Duckling had a very strange sensation."

That "very strange sensation" was the beautiful bird's (for he was no ugly duckling, nor ever had been) sudden consciousness of his kinship with the beau tiful birds aloft, and mingled with that consciousness was the divine humility which is an attribute of heaven-dowered genius, as distinguished from the kind of genius that gets itself accepted by means of self-exploitation and self-assertion….