airy flight of the bird, and he enters partially into bird life. Let
the little girl personate the hen with her feathery brood of chickens,
and her own maternal instinct is quickened, as she guards and guides
the wayward motion of the little flock. Let the child play the
carpenter, the wheelwright, the wood-sawyer, the farmer, and his
intelligence is immediately awakened; he will see the force, the
meaning, the power, and the need of labor. In short, let him mirror in
his play all the different aspects of universal life, and his thought
will begin to grasp their significance.

Thus kindergarten play may be defined as a "systematized sequence of
experiences through which the child grows into self-knowledge,
clear observation, and conscious perception of the whole circle of
relationships," and the symbols of his play become at length the truth
itself, bound fast and deep in heart knowledge, which is deeper and
rarer than head knowledge, after all.

To the class occupied exclusively with material things, this phase of
Froebel's idea may perhaps seem mystical. There is nothing mystical
to children, however; all is real, for their visions have not been
dispelled.

"Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen, I now can see no more."

As soon as the child begins to be conscious of his own activities and
his power of regulating them, he desires to imitate the actions of his
future life.

Nothing so delights the little girl as to play at housekeeping in her
tiny mansion, sacred to the use of dolls. See her whimsical attention
to dust and dirt, her tremendous wisdom in dispensing the work and
ordering the duties of the household, her careful attention to the
morals and manners of her rag-babies.

The boy, too, tries to share in the life of a man, to play at his
father's work, to be a miniature carpenter, salesman, or what not. He
rides his father's cane and calls it a horse, in the same way that
the little girl wraps a shawl about a towel, and showers upon it the
tenderest tokens of maternal affection. All these examples go to show
that every conscious intellectual phase of the mind has a previous
phase in which it was unconscious or merely symbolic.

To get at the spirit and inspiration of symbolic representation in
song and game, it is necessary first of all to study Froebel's "Mutter
und Kose-Lieder," perhaps the most strikingly original, instructive,
serviceable book in the