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 view, and his personification of an old clothes-press or a darning-needle was therefore as natural as that of a child who beats the chair against which it bumped its head. In the works of more ambitious scope, where this code of conduct would be out of place, Andersen was never wholly at his ease. As lovers, his heroes usually cut a sorry figure; their milk-and-water passion is described, but it is never felt. They make themselves a trifle ridiculous by their innocence, and are amusing when they themselves least suspect it. Likewise, in his autobiography, he is continually exposing himself to ridicule by his _naive_ candor, and his inability to adapt himself to the etiquette which prevails among grown-up people. Take as an instance his visit to the Brothers Grimm, when he asked the servant girl which of the brothers was the more learned, and when she answered "Jacob," he said, "Then take me to Jacob." The little love affair, too, which he confides seems to have been of the kind which one is apt to experience during the pinafore period; a little more serious, perhaps, but yet of the same kind. It is