Chapter 1

My life 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 thy 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.

My native land, Denmark, is a poetical land, full of popular
traditions, old songs, and an eventful history, which has become bound
up with that of Sweden and Norway. The Danish islands are possessed of
beautiful beech woods, and corn and clover fields: they resemble
gardens on a great scale. Upon one of these green islands, Funen,
stands Odense, the place of my birth. Odense is called after the pagan
god Odin, who, as tradition states, lived here: this place is the
capital of the province, and lies twenty-two Danish miles from
Copenhagen.

In the year 1805 there lived here, in a small mean room, a young
married couple, who were extremely attached to each other; he was a
shoemaker, scarcely twenty-two years old, a man of a richly gifted and
truly poetical mind. His wife, a few years older than himself, was
ignorant of life and of the world, but possessed a heart full of love.
The young man had himself made his shoemaking bench, and the bedstead
with which he began housekeeping; this bedstead he had made out of the
wooden frame which had borne only a short time before the coffin of the
deceased Count Trampe, as he lay in state, and the remnants of the
black cloth on the wood work kept the fact still in remembrance.

Instead of a noble corpse, surrounded by crape and wax-lights, here
lay, on the second of April, 1805, a living and weeping child,--that
was myself, Hans Christian Andersen. During the first day of my
existence my father is said to have sate by the bed and read aloud in
Holberg, but I cried all the time. "Wilt thou go to sleep, or listen
quietly?" it is reported that my father asked in joke; but I still
cried on; and even in the church, when I was taken to be baptized, I
cried so loudly that the preacher, who was a passionate man, said, "The
young one screams like a cat!" which words my mother never forgot. A
poor emigrant, Gomar, who stood as godfather, consoled her in the mean
time by saying that the louder I cried as a child, all the more
beautifully should I sing when I grew older.

Our little room, which was almost filled with the shoemaker's bench,
the bed, and my