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can incarnate himself, then humanity can be the receptacle of the divine. Finally, as each man ascends into the divine image he becomes a sharer in divine activity, and from an object of nurture is transformed into a nurturer.

Least things are explained by greatest, and only as you sympathize with Froebel's final aim can you realize the importance of actual care for plants and animals and understand the significance of the Barnyard Play as a means of quickening the sense of responsibility and granting to childhood some prescience of the joy which springs from the exercise of nurturing love.

When we study the past history of our earth we become aware that Nature has been undergoing a gradual pacification. Cyclones, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the wild fury of the sca, are but faint echoes of the convulsions of long-vanished days. There was an age when vegetable life ran riot and no animal could cope with its resistless strength. There was a time when great mastodons and ichthyosauri were masters of the earth. There will come a time when man shall be not only theoretically but practically lord of creation, when he shall have drained the swamp, fertilized the desert,

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subdued the riotous vegetable life of South America, extirpated the irredeemable brute, domesticated all animals capable of moral and mental improvement, and when, himself regenerate, he shall rule a regenerate earth. Symbol and prophecy of that happy time is the little child in the Barnyard, a new Adam in a new paradise, to whom God giveth the beasts of the field for a heritage and the fowls of the air for a possession.

The discovery of life, the response of life to life, the prophecy of freedom, the disclosure of human and divine love, the revelation of human and divine homes, the extinction of the savage beast in the world and in the soul, the vision of nurtured and nurturing life-such are the truths Froebel holds up to the imagination of the child and the thought of the mother in his Animal Songs. What aspect of animal life has he ignored? To what worthy analogy has he been blind?

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LETTER IX.

A PROPHECY OF FREEDOM.

THE FISH IN THE BROOK.

A child regards with new delight
Each living thing that meets his sight;
But when within the limpid stream
He sees the fishes dart and gleam,
Or when, through pure transparent space
The bird's swift flight he tries to trace,
Their freer motion fills his heart
With joy that seems of it a part-
A joy that speaks diviner birth,

While yet he treads the ways of earth.

HENRIETTA R. ELIOT.

THE FISH IN THE BROOK.

Merry little fishes,

In the brook at play,

Floating in the shallows,

Darting swift away.

"Happy little fishes, come and play with me!"
"No, O no!" the fishes say, "that can never be!"

Pretty bodies curving,
Bending like a bow,

Through the clear, bright water,

See them swiftly go.

"Happy little fishes, may we play with you?"

"No, O no!" the fishes say, "that would never do!"

EMILY HUNTINGTON MILLER.

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