uncouth, impure or vulgar.
out the best in every one.

His mere presence ennobled and brought
In spite of this purity and loftiness, no

one felt oppressed or constrained, but freed and exalted.

And in spite of this effect of the nature born with him, he was a man, a whole man, adorned with all manly attributes, with delight in all that was powerful and virtuous, with energy of character and with the strongest feelings, full of earnestness and anger against every thing mean and unworthy. Endowed with the deepest sensibility, he was anything but what is usually called in these effeminate times, in the favorite sense of the word, a 66 charming man." He was much too conscientious and earnest for that, and the lofty, inspiring idea of his life left no room for weak sentimentality. He made the most earnest demands of those around him as well as of himself. A man was put into that tenderly-built body; he had steeled himself early, he had fought at twenty in Lützow's corps, and I learned to know him in the last five years as a robust mountain-traveler in the Thüringian forests. He knew nothing of what men think belongs to advanced years, or what self-indulgence means.

This man had to be seen among the girls or young ladies who were in Froebel's institute at Marienthal, near Liebenstein, which he carried on after Froebel's death; had to be seen in the kindergarten at Liebenstein, to form a conception of the attachment not only of the young ladies, but of the smallest children for him. Froebel surpassed him in the conceptions of his genius, but he surpassed Froebel in clearness and direct fruitfulness of representation. The purity of mind, the enthusiasm for the idea which had captivated them, their magic powers over receptive feelings, they shared in common. Two hearts and one thought, two souls and one feeling, Orestes and Pylades, Castor and Pollux, Damon and Pythias, Froebel and Middendorff! Froebel knew what he had in Middendorff, and Middendorff, when old, still looked with wondering eyes up to Froebel. Both were united by their ideal of education, both were nourished and greatly attracted by the spirit of Pestalozzi, whom they honored as long as they lived, without losing their own individuality.

The world of to-day has lost the power of comprehending this. The leaders and guides of pedagogy have missed it all or they have never learnt to know it. They have had no idea of its existence or its possibility, and the endless majority of teachers know nothing of it. We ask, with the deepest pain, where has the enthusiasm for youth and the public weal gone? Is there not discontent, despondency, mediocrity, in its place? Does anything else proceed from those who consider themselves the reformers of the time, and declare themselves such, but wordy exhortations for a faith that does

not rouse the spiritual powers of man, but paralyzes them? And do they not seek for the salvation of the teachers and their pupils in stupefying morning and evening devotions, in liturgies and songs, and in other measures for the limiting of knowledge and ability?

How it is amongst the teachers of the present time, as to the enthusiasm, the aspiring, cheerful feeling, the inner enjoyment of their calling, which without these is a badly-rewarded, hireling service; how it is as to the pleasure with which they once looked forward to the teachers' conventions: he knows who can compare past times and the present. He also knows what spirit predominated among the young people who devoted themselves to the teachers' calling in the institutions which were animated by the youth-restoring Pestalozzian spirit; and what is it now? The whole world knows that men of the purest enthusiasm, of the noblest strivings, of the highest capacity of self-sacrifice-that Friedrich Froebel, and all who adhered to him, especially Middendorff, were suspected of communism, of socialism, of atheism and free-thinking!

Was Middendorff also a Christian?

I hold it to be a disgrace, after such a man was found by experience to be what he was, that such a question should arise. It proceeds from those who seek for the essence of Christianity in externals, and who never have shared its spirit. Such low fellows, who now have an opportunity to show themselves off, but who are an abomination to the more profound and modest men who dislike to cast the pearls of their souls before swine and to boast of their faith,-deserve no answer. It has, therefore, struck me unpleasantly that even Lange notices the question and answers it. I know very well whence the impulse came; it lies very near; but in spite of that we must not gratify the men of words and show, by recognizing the title to such a questioning. For what but vanity, spiritual pride, spite for the popularity of their superiors, what else but absorption in palpable externals and immeasurable arrogance in spite of their humble words, lies at the bottom of it?

Middendorff a Christian? That St. John's-soul a Christian? Thus ask those who presume to measure with their wooden rule the infinite diversity of minds? Would these men, who think themselves alone good and pious-(the question is allowable in view of the well-known deeds of our day), would they have found Christ himself correct according to their system? Hardly; he was in his time declared by the scribes and creed-followers to be an adversary and a heretic. A feeling seizes me of mixed disgust and abhorrence when I think that such presumption even enters into the teachers' institutes, where it is looked upon as faith well pleasing to God, and is filtered into the

young teachers. A dark, mournful spirit rests upon the schools. A fearful mistrust spreads over the teachers; fear arises when a hundred or fifty of them meet together without superintendence; they have ceased "to believe in love and faith"; even a Middendorff could not escape their suspicion, that pure, white human soul, in which, with a microscope, no trace of falsehood and deception could be discovered, who fought in youth for German life, German freedom and unity, and devoted his whole existence to the development and education of German youth!

What could this man as well as Froebel not have done for the creation of the most intrinsic devotion and love to our children, those rarest qualities in teachers, and of the equally rare knowledge of children, so peculiar to them, if the powers and qualities of these men, who do not return to us-for when will another Pestalozzian time come?-if they had been used in suitable places? In vain they made life-long exertions to find a quite suitable and permanent asylum and sufficient means for their object, which was a pedagogic, central point, unifying and acting in all directions; they tried in foreign lands, and even there did not find the right place; the time was past when thousands flocked to Basedow, and a noble prince received him; "faith in love and truth" had vanished, and even the hope of seeing a living central institution for the intellectual culture of the nation blooming out at Weimar in Goethe's centennial jubilee, proved to be a delusion. They laughed at and derided our plan in Berlin as well as in Weimar, and what have they now reached? One statue more instead of a living institution, an increase of the dead treasures of their closed museum, instead of a factor taking hold of the present time. Froebel mourned over it on his death-bed, and Middendorff was grieved.

Mid

I pass over a great deal, and mention but one thing more. dendorff was no writer; writing was disagreeable to him; the rush of his thoughts hindered a systematic arrangement of them; yet he wrote as he could not help doing, intellectually and subjectively; but his greatest power was not in that, it was shown in the living word; he was an orator. He showed that in Hamburg, in Liebenstein, and in Salzungen. In the autumn of 1850 the friends of Froebel held a meeting in the Liebenstein 'Kurhause,' at the well-known 'Erdfalle.' On the second day was the exhibition of the fruits of the efforts made for little children in the spirit of Froebel. The teachers told this, the kindergartners that. At last came Middendorff, who told what he had observed in the children of the peasantry and their mothers in the region around Keilhau, which he was in the habit of visiting on Sundays. It went home to all hearts.

And how he spoke in May, 1853, at Salzungen, at the fifth General Assembly of German teachers! I do not deny that there as well as here I trembled with joyful exultation. This extraordinary effect of the appearance of Middendorff I ascribe essentially to his sincerity. Everything was in harmony in him, bodily as well as spiritually. One always knew where to find him. A true, beautiful, beneficent image of him is left to his friends. He stands before their recollection in the perfected harmony of his being. In a man of this kind one cannot ask after this or that peculiarity, whether he possessed this or that quality; that would be impertinent.

He was not this or that; he did not make himself this or that; he was a unit, and therefore he was everything that he had the capacity of being. The pygmies and Lilliputians of the pedagogues of to-day wish to produce this and that; they wish to make everything, to make, that is to pervert and train, but they produce nothing, because they will not let nature, which is God-given, exist or grow. How far removed wert thou, noble friend, from this old-new "wisdom!" Who of those present at the Liebenstein meeting will not remember how he dealt with the man who wanted to subordinate everything to the model of "Christian orthodoxy," and was not willing to recognize the right of each individual to his own natural development.

He, the single-minded, harmoniously-cultivated, perfect man of his kind, felt, as others did, a detestation of the thought of what must yet become of the world which he found so glorious and beautiful in the manifoldness of its manifestations, if the priests of all sects should suceced, like shepherds, in casting the net of their faith, as the only saving one, over the heads of their flocks! At this idea a terror seized the pure soul which knew so well what it owed to a natural, free development. How this man clung to nature, how he worshiped the hand of the Creator, when he dwelt upon the laws of man's nature! His soul soared into God's free heaven, where he felt at home; there he was nearer to his Cod, there he understood the decrees of his genius. It moves me when I think of the expression of his face, the glory of his eyes, and the tone of his voice, as he poured out his inmost soul upon the top of the island mountain! He was convinced of the immortal existence of the human soul, and of its progressive development as the source of blessedness.

Where does that pure, transfigured human soul linger now? To see and enjoy thee again, released from earthly tribulations, would alone be a heaven, an unspeakable rapture!

Have pia anima, anima candida,
Never-to-be-forgotten friend!

It was by such hearty characterizations as this of Middendorff, and his earlier notices of Froebel and the Kindergarten in the Rheinische Blätter, and Pädagogishes Jahrbuch, as soon as he became thoroughly acquainted with them, that Diesterweg rendered such essential service to the New Education. Until its principles and methods, its founder and co-laborers were recognized by Diesterweg, the ablest champion of a broad liberal elementary education for the whole people, and whose voice was potential in spite of the disfavor of the court, the Kindergarten had not arrested the attention of pedagogical circles in Germany. Diesterweg, though late in the field, was the first to proclaim the full significance of play, Froebel's addition to pedagogical science, as the firm foundation in the child's earliest instruction, for his own PrussianPestalozzian system of intuitional teaching.* The Baroness Marenholtz Bülow, in all her great and varied and ubiquitous service to the Frobelian cause, never did a better day's work than when she persuaded the great master, in spite of his prejudices "against all fooling in educational matters," to go and listen and see what Froebel had to say and do, on the 15th of July, 1849, in his little modest farm house in Liebenstein. He went, was charmed, and was satisfied that Froebel "had actually something of a seer and looked into the inmost nature of the child as no one else had done." From that day he went every day for weeks afterwards, with the "Mother and Cosset Songs" under his arm, to learn more of the Kindergarten and converse with Froebel.

Both Diosterweg and Froebel were pupils of Pestalozzi, and both found, in the instinctive activity of the child, the impulse and method of mental development; but Froebel was the first to formulate these methods in the Nursery and Kindergarten for the full development of the entire human being, and furnish the basis of the intuitional instruction which Pestalozzi was the first to discover, and Diesterweg and other Directors of Teachers' Seminaries to develop into a system of elementary education for the people.

The Prussian-Pestalozzian system of elementary instruction, as described by Stowe, Bache and Mann, before the restrictions of the "Regulativ" of 1854 were applied to the currriculum and methods of the Primary Teachers' Seminaries, was the creation of such Directors of Seminaries as Harnisch, Diesterweg, and others of the Pestalozzian school.

In the original issue of the Wegweisser we find no special recognition of the Kindergarten. In the latest edition, there is a very valuable paper on both Froebel and the Kindergarten by Ferdinand Winthur.†

For the contents of this model Guide for German teachers, see Barnard's Journal of Education, vol. vii, p. 312. In the same connection will be found a brief memoir of this great teacher and popular educator. Diesterweg's chapter in edition of 1854, on Intuitional and Speaking Exercises, as published in same Journal (Vol xii, p. 411–430), and Dr. Busse's article in edition of 1876, republished in Vol. xxx, p. 417-450, are in the true spirit and method of Froebel applied to children after leaving the Kindergarten. + This paper will be found in Barnard's Journal xxxi, p. 82-90.