rinciples and by his
methods. This will hardly be done in this country, at least at present;
but to supply the place of such a class, a lady of Boston has prepared
and published, under copyright, Froebel's First Gift, consisting of six
soft balls of the three primary and the three secondary colors, which
are sold in a box, with a little manual for mothers, in which the true
principle and plan of tending babies, so as not to rasp their nerves,
but to amuse without wearying them, is very happily suggested. There
is no mother or nurse who would not be assisted by this little manual
essentially. As it says in the beginning,--"Tending babies is an art,
and every art is founded on a science of observations; for love is not
wisdom, but love must act _according to wisdom_ in order to succeed.
Mothers and nurses, however tender and kind-hearted, may, and oftenest
do, weary and vex the nerves of children, in well-meant efforts to amuse
them, and weary themselves the while. Froebel's exercises, founded on
the observations of an intelligent sensibility, are intended to amuse
without wearying, to educate without vexing."

Froebel's Second Gift for children, adapted to the age from one to two
or three years, with another little book of directions, has also been
published by the same lady, and is perhaps a still greater boon to every
nursery; for this is the age when many a child's temper is ruined,
and the inclination of the twig wrongly bent, through sheer _want of
resource and idea_, on the part of nurses and mothers.

But it is to the next age--from three years old and upwards--that the
Kindergarten becomes the desideratum, if not a necessity. The isolated
home, made into a flower-vase by the application of the principles set
forth in the Gifts[A] above mentioned, may do for babies. But every
mother and nurse knows how hard it is to meet the demands of a child
too young to be taught to read, but whose opening intelligence and
irrepressible bodily activity are so hard to be met by an adult, however
genial and active. Children generally take the temper of their whole
lives from this period of their existence. Then "the twig is bent,"
either towards that habit of self-defence which is an ever-renewing
cause of selfishness, or to the sun of love-in-exercise, which is the
exhaustless source of goodness and beauty.

[Footnote A: These Gifts, the private enterprise of an invalid lady, the
same who first brought the subject of Kindergar