Tear Jerker / Hans Christian Andersen

• The Story Of A Mother, which is so heart-wrenching that it has been known to make people cry just with a plot summary...
  • Long story short: A mother spends three days and nights watching over her sick child, only for Death to claim it as soon as she nods off. She puts herself through hell in every sense but the literal one - maiming, blinding, and balding herself in the process - to get her child back. And ultimately, she ends up with nothing to show for it as Death convinces her to accept the will of God and let her child go. You may cry now.
• The Fir Tree, in which said tree envies the beauty of Christmas trees—but when it is chosen, after Christmas it dies alone and forgotten in an attic, is promptly chopped up and thrown in the fire.
• The Bottle Neck (can be found here) is an achingly sad story about the life of a glass bottle, which we first meet as just the bottle neck, used by a poor old maid as a drinking glass for her pet bird. As the bottle recounts its adventures, we see it was filled with wine and used to celebrate the betrothal of a young couple, then sent with the young man as he went to sea, then used as the bottle of a message-in-a-bottle as the ship went down, which was found but the locals couldn't read it... and on and on. By the time the bottle is just the bottle neck, the poor old maid is the same woman who was the young betrothed wife, never knowing what happened to her beloved and why he never came home.
• The Daisy is so over-the-top sad that it probably becomes Glurge for many. It's a love story about a daisy and a lark. In the end, some kids catch the lark and put him in a cage, along with some turf (including the daisy) to line it, but they forget to give him any water, so he dies in agony from thirst, while refusing to harm the daisy to get any moisture. The kids hold a funeral for the lark, and the daisy mourns more than anyone else, but she's tossed out to die on the side of the road.