A SINGULAR BOOK.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume IX, Issue 15, 9 April 1892, Page 389

A SINGULAR BOOK.

The life of Hans Christian Andersen has just been published in Copenhagen. We find in it an incident which offers a useful suggestion. When he was a mere child, we are told, he began to keep a diary, and also to preserve every letter, bill, or printed statement concerning the members of his family. He persevered in this practice until the day of his death. His biographer, when he began his work, was given chests filled with thousands of papers and letters preserved by the poet. The great mass of these were destroyed as worthless, but many were found to be of great value, not only as bearing upon the history of Andersen's life, but as illustrative of forgotten phases of social and domestic life. They give to the memoir a singular and real charm. One of the foremost of American writers had two large folio volumes, which were only shown to his intimate friends, in which were pasted his boyish compositions, the letters written to him when he was a child, clippings from school and college reports, records of family history, criticisims on his work, all the details, in short, which enter into the secret history of a life. At middle age. no book could be so interesting to a man as this. It would be a photograph of himself as a child and lad, and what new comer, whether friend or enemy, could concern him so much as the boy that he once was ? It would be to him something like the map in the Bible in which is traced the wandering of the children of Israel. ‘ Here,’ he would say, ‘I left the path, and there again, and there. At that place death faced me and was turned back ; all along the way kindness and love have gone with me. There I sinned, and was forgiven.’ Looking at this map of bis life with older and clearer eyes he would see how he had never been a!one. how God had gone with him throngh every step of the way. How many of the younger readers of the Graphic will make such a book ?

To be genuine it must be for their own reading only.