shes and to encourage
the smaller German States to rise against Napoleon.

No thirst for glory prompted this action, but a lofty conception of
the office of the educator. How could any young man capable of bearing
arms, Froebel says, become a teacher of children whose Fatherland he
had refused to defend? how could he in after years incite his pupils
to do something noble, something calling for sacrifice and
unselfishness, without exposing himself to their derision and
contempt? The reasoning was perfect, and he made practice follow upon
the heels of theory as closely as he had always done since he became
master of his fate.

After the Peace of Paris he settled down for a time to a quiet life in
the mineralogical museum at the University of Berlin, his duties being
the care, arrangement, and investigation of crystals. Surrounded thus
by the exquisite formations whose development according to law is so
perfect, whose obedience to the promptings of an inward ideal so
complete, he could not but learn from their unconscious ethics to look
into the depths of his own nature, and there recognize more clearly
the purpose it was intended to work out.

In 1816 he quietly gave up his position, and taking as pupils five of
his nephews, three of whom were fatherless, he entered upon his life
work, the first step in which was the carrying out of his plan for a
"Universal German Educational Institute." He was without money, of
course, as he had always been and always would be,--his hands were
made for giving, not for getting; he slept in a barn on a wisp of
straw while arranging for his first school at Griesheim; but outward
things were so little real to him in comparison with the life of the
spirit, that bodily privations seemed scarcely worth considering. The
school at Keilhau, to which he soon removed, the institutions later
established in Wartensee and Willisau, the orphanage in Burgdorf, all
were most successful educationally, but, it is hardly necessary to
say, were never a source of profit to their head and founder.

Through the twenty succeeding years, busy as he was in teaching, in
lecturing, in writing, he was constantly shadowed by dissatisfaction
with the foundation upon which he was building. A nebulous idea for
the betterment of things was floating before him; but it was not until
1836 that it appeared to his eyes as a "definite truth." This definite
truth, the discovery of his old age, was of course the kindergarten;