of interest and power is obtained by a persevering attention to the elementary parts until they be perfectly familiar to the mind; and what confidence and interest the child is inspired with by the consciousness of complete and perfect attainment, even in the lowest stage of instruction. Never before had I so deeply felt the important bearing which the first elements of every branch of knowledge have upon its complete outline, and what immense deficiencies in the final result of it must arise from the confusion and imperfection of the simplest beginnings. To bring these to maturity and perfection in the child's mind became now a main object of my attention; and the success far surpassed my expectations. The consciousness of energies hitherto unknown to themselves was rapidly developed in the children, and a general sense of order and harmony began to prevail among them. They felt their own powers, and the tediousness of the common school tone vanished like a specter from the room. They were determined to try, they succeeded; they persevered, they accomplished and were delighted. Their mood was not that of laborious learning, it was the joy of unknown powers aroused from sleep; their hearts and minds were elevated by the anticipation of what their powers would enable them to attempt and to effect."

Of course his first difficulty was to arrest the attention of a great number of children. This he overcame by appealing to their senses. Combining this experience with the ideas he had received many years before from Rousseau, he invented his system of object-lessons. He was also driven by his needs

to something like a system of monitors, though in an informal way. If a child was found to know anything he was put between two others to whom he might teach it.

Thus, during the short period, not more than a year, which Pestalozzi spent among the children at Stanz, he settled the main features of the Pestalozzian system.

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needed them. It is a I shall not forget those

Sickness broke out among the children, and the wear and tear was too great even for Pestalozzi. He would probably have sunk under his efforts if the French, pressed by the Austrians, had not entered Stanz, in January, 1799, and taken part of the Ursuline Convent for a military hospital. Pestalozzi was, therefore, obliged to break up the school, and he himself went to a medicinal spring on the Gurnigel in the Canton Bern. Here," he says, "I enjoyed days of recreation. wonder that I am still alive. days as long as I live; they saved me: but I could not live without my work." He came down from the Gurnigel, and began to teach in the primary schools (i. e., schools for children from four to eight years old) of Burgdorf, the second town in the Canton. Here the director was jealous of him, and he met with much opposition. "It was whispered," he tells us, "that I myself could not write nor work accounts, nor even read properly. Popular reports," he adds, " are not always entirely wrong. It is true I could not write nor read nor work accounts well."

A strange account has been left us of his teaching in the school by Ramsauer, then a scholar in it, and afterward one of Pestalozzi's assistants :

"I got about as much regular schooling as the other scholars," he writes—that is, none at all; "but Pestalozzi's sacred zeal, his devoted love, which caused him. to be entirely unmindful of himself, his serious and depressed state of mind, which struck even the children, made the deepest impression on me, and knit my childlike and grateful heart to his forever. Pestalozzi's intention was, that all the instruction given in this school should start from form, number, and language, and should have constant reference to these elements. There was no regular plan, not any timetable. He taught nothing but drawing, ciphering, and exercises in language. He had not patience to allow things to be gone over a second time, or to put questions (in arithmetic), and in his enormous zeal for the instruction of the whole school, he seemed not to concern himself in the slightest degree for the individual scholar. The best things we had with him were the exercises in language, at least those which he gave us on the paper-hangings of the school-room, which were real exercises in observation. Boys,' he would say (he never named the girls), 'what do you see? Answer-A hole in the wainscot.' Pestalozzi-Very good. Now repeat after me-I see a hole in the wainscot. I see a long hole in the wainscot. Through the hole I see the wall. Through the long narrow hole I see the wall,' and so forth. As Pestalozzi, in his zeal, did not tie himself to any particular time, we generally went on until eleven o'clock with whatever we had commenced at eight, and by ten o'clock he was always tired and hoarse. We knew when it was eleven by the noise of the other

THE INSTITUTE AT YVERDUN.

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school children in the street, and then we usually all ran out without bidding good-bye."

After this account of Pestalozzi's instruction, we can hardly wonder that the school rector at Burgdorf was not grateful for his assistance.

In less than a year Pestalozzi left this school in bad health, and joined Krüsi in opening a new school in Burgdorf Castle, for which he afterward (1802) obtained Government aid. Here he was assisted in carrying out his system by Krüsi, Tobler, and Bluss. He now embodied the results of his experience in a work which has obtained great celebrity"How Gertrude Teaches her Children."

In 1802 Pestalozzi, for once in his life a successful and popular man, was elected a member of a deputation sent by the Swiss people to Paris.

On the restoration of the Cantons in 1804, the Castle of Burgdorf was again occupied by one of the chief magistrates, and Pestalozzi and his establishment were moved to the Monastery of Buchsee. Here the teachers gave the principal direction to another, the since celebrated Fellenberg, "not without my consent," says Pestalozzi, "but to my profound mortification." He therefore soon accepted an invitation from the inhabitants of Yverdun to open an institution there, and within a twelvemonth he wa followed by his old assistants, who had found government by Fellenberg less to their taste than no-govern ment by Pestalozzi.

The Yverdun Institute had soon a world-wide repu tation. Pestalozzian teachers went from it to Madrid, to Naples, to St. Petersburg. Kings and philosophers joined in doing it honor. But, as Pestalozzi himself

has testified, these praises were but as a laurel-wreath encircling a skull. The life of the Pestalozzian institutions had been the love which the old man had infused into all the members, teachers as well as chil dren; but this life was wanting at Yverdun. The es tablishment was much too large to be carried on successfully without more method and discipline than Pestalozzi, remarkable, as he himself says, for his "unrivaled incapacity to govern," was master of. The assistants began each to take his own line, and even the outward show of unity was soon at an end. Nothing is less interesting or profitable than the details of bygone quarrels, so I will not go into the great feud between Niederer and Schmid, which in its day made a good deal of noise in the scholastic world, as even less important disputes have done and will do in the world at large. There were, too, many mistakes made at Yverdun. Pestalozzi was mad with enthusiasm to improve elementary education, especially for the poor, throughout Europe. His zeal led him to announce his schemes and methods before he had given them a fair trial; hence many foolish things came abroad as Pestalozzianism, and hindered the reception of principles and practices which better deserved the name. Pestalozzi, too, unfortunately thought that his influence depended on the opinion which was formed of his institution; so he published a highly-colored account of it, and tried to conceal its defects from the strangers by whom he was con stantly visited (see Appendix, p. 313). "His highly active imagination," says Raumer, himself for some time an inmate of the institution, "led him to see and describe as actually existing whatever he hoped sooner