ry grasses, but to sort these into different kinds gave no
pleasure, though older children would have enjoyed trying to find many
varieties.

Perhaps teachers with a fair amount of experience might have felt like
the beginner who frankly says, "I didn't say anything more because I
didn't know what to say," when Dorothy discovered the wonderfulness of
glass. Perhaps we are silent because the child has gone ahead of us. It
is wonderful, but we have never thought about it. In such cases we must,
as Froebel says, "become a learner with the child" and humbly, with real
sympathy and earnestness, ask, "Is it wonderful, I suppose it is, but I
never thought about it, why do _you_ call it wonderful?" If the child
answers, it is well, if not the teacher can go on thinking aloud,
thinking with the child. "Let's think what other things we can see
through." We can never understand it, we can only reach the fact of
"transparency" as a wonderful property of certain substances and
consider which possess this magic quality. There is water of course, and
there is jelly or gelatine, but these are not hard, they are not stones
as glass seems to be. The child will be pleased too to see a crystal or
a bit of mica, but the main thing is that we should not imagine we have
disposed of the wonder by a mere name with a glib, "Oh, that's just
because it's transparent," but that we realise, and reinforce and
deepen the child's sense of wonderfulness. So teacher and child enter
into the thoughts of Him

Who endlessly was teaching
Above my spirits utmost reaching,
What love can do in the leaf or stone,
So that to master this alone,
This done in the stone or leaf for me,
I must go on learning endlessly.

CHAPTER X

A WAY TO GOD

Wonders chiefly at himself
Who can tell him what he is
Or how meet in human elf
Coming and past eternities.

EMERSON.

It is of set purpose that this short chapter, referring to what we
specially call religion, is placed immediately after that on the child's
attitude to Nature. The actual word religion, which, to him, expressed
being bound, did not appeal to Froebel so much as one which expressed
One-ness with God.

As a son can share the aspirations of his father, so man "a thought of
God"

can aspire
From earth's level where blindly creep
Things perfected more or less
To the heaven's height far and steep.

But we begin at earth's level, and a