Author: Hans Christian Andersen

Publisher: General Books

Published: 2012-02

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9781458938503

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: POSTSCRIPT. A?fD now what have I to say ? Here we sit again by our own firesides, and can, peacefully muse over the bright scenes through which we have followed the kindly poet. Bright What is brighter than a look into that neighbourland of enchantment, which our leader tells us is ever at hand Better feel we, and meeker, after such a voyage, with such a cheerily burning lamp as this book in our hands Andersen hath struck the wildest and the tenderest chords of his lyre, and flung impetuously out the full and rolling ideas that filled his mind. Has he no farther meaning, no deeper intent in this work ? Yes surely. He would make, and perhaps he may, poets of his hearers. He would cause them to think. He would remind them of that touch of Nature, which a mightier bard hath told us makes the whole world kin. Poetry, ?and people begin to see, to feel it now, ?ris not so mightily discordant with social life, and Andersen hath shown this, or striven to show it, throughout the whole of his literary career. He has discovered Poetry amidst the most common-place of all things. And how ? By seeking it But he hath endeavoured, too, and with goodly success, to show the near connection there exists between the highest pursuits, the holiest, and the lowliest. His works contam a theory, a theoryit were well that all mankind should study; and they go stiil farther than mere theory, by proving that hypothesis with triumphant success. His last chapter contains the most decisive expression of it. Is not Poetry in all things, but most in that which renders greater the Being whom God created in his own likeness ? .There have been men, and are still such, who press humanity down to the level of the brute. Such men ever look upon Intellect as a thing of naught, and such men are the enemies ..