"Death Is a Nice Sandman"

Thanks to Gillian Brown's wide-ranging reading of Hawthorne's histories for children, particularly Grandfather's Chair, in The Cambridge Companion to Nathaniel Hawthorne (2004), I was reminded that Neil Gaiman's Sandman draws its inspiration from all over the map--including Hans Christian Anderson's "The Sandman." It was a nice touch to turn the original Sandman's brother Death into Dream's gothy sister--wondering if the specific quotation that supplies the title to this post inspired Gaiman's characterization of Death. Seems spot-on to me.