hat _all_ things exist to make manifest
the spirit, the _elan vital_, which brought them into being. "_Sursum
corda_," says Stevenson,

Lift up your hearts
Art and Blue Heaven
April and God's Larks
Green reeds and sky scattering river
A Stately Music
Enter God.

And Browning? "If you get simple beauty and nought else, you get about
the best thing God invents."

To let children get that beauty should be our aim, and they must get it
in their own way. "Life in and with Nature and with the fair silent
things of Nature, should be fostered by parents and others," Froebel
tells us, "as a chief fulcrum of child-life, and this is accomplished
chiefly in play, which is at first simply natural life."

Let us surmount the ruts of our teaching experience and climb high
enough to look back upon our own childhood, to see where beauty called
to us, where we attained to beauty.

Among my own earliest recollections come a first view of the starry sky
and the discovery of Heaven. No one called attention to the stars, they
spoke themselves to a child of four or five and declared "the glory of
God." Heaven was not on high among these glorious stars, however. It was
a grassy place with flowers and sunshine. It had to be Heaven because
you went through the cemetery to reach it, and because it was so bright
and flowery and there were no graves in it. I never found it again,
because I had forgotten how to get there.

Another very early memory is one of grief, to see from the window how
the gardener was mowing down all the daisies, and there were so many, in
the grass; and yet another is of a high, grassy, sunny field with a
little stream running far down below. It was not really far and there
was nothing particularly beautiful in the place to grown-up eyes, but
the beholder was very small and loved it dearly. To his Art and Blue
Heaven Stevenson might have added Sun and Green Grass. For he knew what
grassy places are to the child, and that "happy play in grassy places"
might well be Heaven to the little one.

A most interesting little book called _What is a Kindergarten?_[22] was
published some years ago in America. It is written by a landscape
gardener, and contains most valuable suggestions as to how best to use
for a Kindergarten or Nursery School plots of ground which may be
secured for that purpose. Naturally the writer has much to say on the
laying out and stocking the available space to the best advantage,
ch