But Hans Andersen was too urgent a moralist to be content to write stories so immorally amusing as this. He was as anxious as a preacher or a parent or Dickens to see children Christians of sorts, and he used the fairy-tale continually as a means of teaching and warning them. In one story he makes the storks decide to punish an ugly boy who had been cruel to them. “There is a little dead child in the pond, one that has dreamed itself to death; we will bring that for him. Then he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother.” That is certainly rather harsh. “The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf” is equally severe. As a result of her cruelty in tearing flies’ wings off and her wastefulness in using a good loaf as a stepping-stone, she sinks down through the mud into Hell, where she is tormented with flies that crawl over her eyes, and having had their wings pulled out, cannot fly away. Hans Andersen, however, like Ibsen in _Peer Gynt_, believes in redemption through the love of others, and even the girl who trod on the loaf is ultimately saved. “Love begets life” runs like a text through “The Marsh King’s Daughter.” His stories as a whole are an imaginative representation of that gospel--a gospel that so easily becomes mush and platitude in ordinary hands. But Andersen’s genius as a narrator, as a grotesque inventor of incident and comic detail, saves his gospel from commonness. He may write a parable about a darning-needle, but he succeeds in making his darning-needle alive, like a dog or a schoolboy. He endows everything he sees--china shepherdesses, tin soldiers, mice and flowers--with the similitude of life, action and conversation. He can make the inhabitants of one’s mantelpiece capable of epic adventures, and has a greater sense of possibilities in a pair of tongs or a door-knocker than most of us have in men and women. He is a creator of a thousand fancies. He loves imagining elves no higher than a mouse’s knee, and mice going on their travels leaning on sausage-skewers as pilgrims’ staves, and little Thumbelina, whose cradle was “a neat polished walnut-shell ... blue violet-leaves were her mattresses, with a rose-leaf for a coverlet.” His fancy never becomes lyrical or sweeps us off our feet, like Shakespeare’s in _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. But there was nothing else like it in the fairy-tale literature of the nineteenth century. And his pages are full of the poetry of flights of birds. More than anything else one thinks of Hans Andersen as a lonely child watching a flight of swans or storks till it is lost to view, silent and full of wonder and sadness. Mr. Edmund Gosse, in _Two Visits to Denmark_, a book in which everything is interesting except the title, describes a visit which he paid to Hans Andersen at Copenhagen in his old age, when “he took me out into the balcony and bade me notice the long caravan of ships going by in the Sound below--‘they are like a flock of wild swans’ he said.” The