Hans Christian Andersen, the poet of a great number of excee­dingly fine Fairy Tales, was born as the son of a shoemaker at Odense in Denmark, in the year 1805 and died at Copenhagen, in 1875.

He did not enter a special profession, but devoted himself entirely to poetry. As a very prolific author, he wrote in addition plenty of novels, poems, and dramas, most of which, it is true, have fallen into oblivion in our days. What, however, will continue to be young and new for ever, are his beautiful Fairy Tales which are well known all over the world. These tales, unlike those by the Brothers Grimm, do not spring from very old and indigenous subjects, but represent, to a great extent, original poetic productions, thus making conspicuous the great versatility of his genius. It is the wide range and variety of his subject — matter which his Fairy Tales reveal: Flowers, ani­mals and men talk, love and suffer with one another, and we become aware of a truly gay superiority in which the poet sets forth his views and feelings on human life. We see him in his Fairy Tales, as it were, artfully smiling, and now and then he even plainly gives to understand that reality is a little bit different after all from what he wants to tell us. Therefore, Andersen’s Fairy Tales are not exclu­sively stories for children, but far more remarkable for their rich pictorial beauty in words and depth of thoughts to grown-up people.

This selected edition in the English language presents to the reader ten of the loveliest tales, sometimes slightly condensed, but without any other material modification of the original form. The editor hopes that this small volume, exquisitely illustrated by Mrs. Gertraud Appelmann, and congenially adapted to the original, will also meet with the same common enthusiasm of old and young alike, that the similar English publication of the Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm has enjoyed, wherever English is being read.