his life,
absolutely.

The woods and God's great out-of-doors gave him balance and ballast,
good digestion and sweet sleep o' nights.

The two years past, he went to Jena, where he had an elder brother. This
brother was a star scholar, and Friedrich looked up to him as a pleiad
of pedagogy. He became a professor in a Jena preparatory school and then
practised medicine; but he never had the misfortune to affront public
opinion, and so oblivion lured and won him, and took him as her own.

At Jena poor Froebel did not make head. His preparatory work hadn't
prepared him. He floundered in studies too deep for one of his age, then
followed some foolish advice and hired a tutor to help him along. Then
he fell down, was plucked, got into debt, and also into the "carcer,"
where he boarded for nine weeks at the expense of the State.

In the carcer he didn't catch up with his studies, quite naturally, and
the imprisonment almost broke his health. Had he been in the carcer for
dueling, he would have emerged a hero. But debt meant that he had
neither money nor friends. When he was given his release, as an economic
move, he slipped away between two days and made his way to the Forestry
Office, where he applied for a job as laborer. He got it. In a few days
he was promoted to chief of apprentices.

Forestry meant a certain knowledge of surveying, and this Froebel soon
acquired. Then came map-making, and that was only fun. From map-making
to architecture is but a step, and Froebel quit the woods to work as
assistant to an architect at ten pounds a year and found, it was
confining work, and a trifle more exacting than he had expected--it
required a deal of mathematics, and mathematics was Froebel's short
suit. Froebel was disappointed and so was his employer--when something
happened. It usually does in books, and in life, always.

* * * * *

Genius has its prototype. Before Froebel comes Pestalozzi, the Swiss,
who studied theology and law, and then abandoned them both as futile to
human evolution, and turned his attention to teaching. Pestalozzi was
inspired by Jean Jacques Rousseau, and read his "Emile" religiously. To
teach by natural methods and mix work and study, and make both play, was
his theme. Pestalozzi believed in teaching out of doors, because
children are both barbaric and nomadic--they want to go somewhere. His
was the Aristotle method, as opposed to those of the closet and the
cloist