PART OF FROEBEL'S LETTER TO KRAUSE, DATED KEILHAU, 24TH MARCH, 1828.


... You have enjoyed, without doubt, unusual good fortune in having
pursued the strict path of culture. You have sailed by Charybdis without
being swallowed up by Scylla.[87] But my lot has been just the reverse.

As I have already told you in the beginning of this letter, I was very
early impressed with the contradictions of life in word and deed--in
fact, almost as soon as I was conscious of anything, living as a lonely
child in a very narrowed and narrowing circle. A spirit of
contemplation, of simplicity, and of childlike faith; a stern, sometimes
cruel, self-repression; a carefully-fostered inward yearning after
knowledge by causes and effects, together with an open-air life amidst
Nature, especially amidst the world of plants, gradually freed my soul
from the oppression of these contradictions. Thus, in my tenth and
eleventh years, I came to dream of life as a connected whole without
contradictions. Everywhere to find life, harmony, freedom from
contradictions, and so to recognise with a keener and clearer perception
the life-unity after which I dimly groped, was the silent longing of my
heart, the mainspring of my existence. But the way thither through the
usual school course, all made up of separate patches, considering things
merely in their outward aspect, and connected by mere arbitrary
juxtaposition, was too lifeless to attract me; I could not remember
things merely put together without inner connection, and so it came
about that after two of my elder brothers had devoted themselves to
study, and because my third brother showed great capacity for study
also, my own education was narrowed; but so much the more closely did a
loving, guiding providence bind my heart in communion with Nature.[88]