THE CASTLE OF BURGDORF.

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renewed under Austrian and French banners, and carried on with barbarian cruelty. Among the victims of these internal dissentions, were twenty-eight fatherless children of Protestant descent, whom the Helvetic government undertook to provide for in the proposed establishment at Burgdorf. The young emigrants, thus driven from their native soil, and separated from all their youthful recollections, were intrusted by the local magistrates to the guidance of Kruesi who, as a schoolmaster, had in an eminent degree merited the confidence of his fellow-citizens. Upon their arrival at Burgdorf, Fisher, who had no accommodations to offer them in the castle, put the children to board in various families of the town, but still kept them united in a day school, for the conduct of which he retained their paternal guide. This led to an acquaintance between Pestalozzi and Kruesi, and, after Fisher's death, to the union of their schools in the castle, the possession of which the central government now transferred to Pestalozzi.

The grant of a large empty building was a strange mode of assisting a man who had not a shilling at his disposal; and yet little as it seemed calculated to promote the realization of his views, it gave him the impulse for an undertaking far superior in extent to any in which he had before embarked. Wandering over a wide range of apartments, which appeared the more spacious the less they contained, he could not arrest the workings of his active imagination, which filled the whole edifice with inhabitants. Here was a dining room, here a suite of class rooms, here a hall for various games during bad weather; airy bedrooms, a fine kitchen, a large garden, every thing necessary for an establishment, except furniture, pupils, teachers, and the nervus rerum. For a man who did not object to spend his days with spelling in a dame school, provided he could teach and educate, such a position as this must have been truly tantalizing.

Nor did he endure it long. He had occasionally been applied to for private lessons by parents of the more opulent

classes, who, seeing the superiority of his mode of teaching, were anxious to ensure to their children the advantages of his plan. The success with which he had met, in applying his views to the claims of a more refined education, suggested to his mind the idea of forming a boarding school in the castle, of which he had now become the tenant. The difficulties which most of the members of the Helvetic government found in providing a suitable education for their children during the time of their residence at Berne, seemed to favour his project, and Pestalozzi having communicated it to some of his friends in office, they exerted themselves so effectually on his behalf, that before the expiration of 1799, he was enabled to announce the opening of an establishment, which counted twenty-six pupils in 1800, and thirtyseven in 1801. Of these, about one third were sons of representatives of different cantons of Switzerland, another part belonged to the wealthier class of tradesmen and agriculturists, and the rest were sons of respectable families, reduced by misfortunes, who were placed under Pestalozzi's care by benevolent friends or relatives. The expense of the first outfit was covered by a loan, which he was afterwards enabled to repay, though not without great difficulties; the small income of the institution being absorbed by its current expenses, so that it would have been impossible even to carry it on, had not the Helvetic government voted him, in addition to the annuity before mentioned, a sufficient provision of fuel from year to year, and a stipend of £25 each to two of his assistants, Kruesi and Buss, who, however, did not receive it, but considering the pressure of Pestalozzi's position, had generosity enough to appropriate it to the general funds of the house, from which they received nothing except their board and lodging. This fact, among others, shows the spirit of self-denial, and the high moral interest, with which the first followers of Pestalozzi embraced his cause; and the possibility, on his part, of accepting such sacrifices from those who were, according to the common notions of the world, his employed servants, reflects more

CONTEMPLATED UNDERTAKINGS.

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credit on his character than the greatest benefits which he could have bestowed upon them. What must have been the moral ascendency, and what the intrinsic humility of a man, whose dignity did not suffer, nor his pride recoil, from being supported by those who had a right to look to him for a remuneration of their services. But he had a greater reward to give than the wages of Mammon, and it was for that reward that his disciples served him. And in this they only followed his example, who-though his new establishment, so far from yielding him any earthly profit, on the contrary imposed upon him care and anxiety ill to be endured by a mind like his,—was yet overflowing with gratitude to Providence for the opportunity afforded him of giving a more extensive trial to his views, and developing and applying more fully the principles which he had already discovered. In this light he considered his boarding school as a most essential means for the advancement of his general object; and while he laboured in it with that intense interest, which the free exercise of his long constrained and cramped energies would naturally produce, he kept his eye steadily fixed upon the original purpose, to which every undertaking of his life was to be made subservient.

A letter addressed by him in February 1801 to the central government at Berne, affords evidence of the comprehensive view which he took of the nature of his task, and the sanguine anticipations in which he indulged with regard to the means by which it might be accomplished. He proposed to himself the following three distinct objects:

1. To pursue the development of this method in all the different branches of private and public education, at the hand of experience.

2. To communicate to the world, by different publications, the result of his researches and experiments, and especially to put into the hands of well-meaning parents and teachers such manuals as would enable them to adopt his plan of instruction.

3. To educate teachers, who, being thoroughly initiated in

48

HOW GERTRUDE TEACHES HER LITTLE ONES.

the spirit of his method, and familiarized with its practical details, should be fit instruments for its effectual propagation.

The means by which he hoped to attain these objects

were:

1. The day school at Burgdorf, of which the young emigrants from Appenzell formed the nucleus.

2. The boarding school, recently formed, which was calculated for the middling and higher classes.

3. A teacher's seminary, the project of which was bequeathed to him by his friend Fisher, and which he had reason to expect would be established at the expense of the Helvetic government as soon as the state of their finances should render it possible.

4. An orphan asylum, the first and still favorite object of his wishes. For this purpose a private subscription had been opened, in addition to which he hoped to derive considerable support from the sale of his manuals and other literary productions on the subject of education, as well as from the profits of his boarding school, if in the course of time it should come into a more flourishing condition.

These were his plans and hopes at the time, when, at the request of his friend Gessner at Zuric, son of the celebrated poet, he gave an historical account of his experiments up to that period, and a general outline of his principles, in a series of letters to which he prefixed, with reference to his popular novel, the title, "How Gertrude Teaches her Little Ones." The impression which this book produced upon the public was highly favorable; it confirmed the friends of his cause in their hopes, and in their affections for him; and it convinced many of those who had been accustomed to tax him as a visionary, and his views and plans as idle speculations. It not only silenced his enemies, but caused many a voice to be raised in his favour; for, although those who have drank into the spirit of the Pestalozzian principles, such as they are now established after the lapse of more than a quarter of a century, may find his expressions often vague and unsatis

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factory, and even his views defective or erroneous in many points, it is not to be forgotten, that when the work was first published, the subject of education was enveloped almost in midnight darkness, and we need therefore not be astonished, that those who had their eyes open, should have hailed the appearance of those celebrated letters as the dawn of a new day.

It is a fact, of which the life of almost every distinguished man affords evidence, that the great mass of the public, dull of comprehension and slow to acknowledge merit, is in the same proportion unintelligently lavish of its admiration, as soon as a man has safely crossed the line of public opinion, and gone through the ordeal of the critical "sailor's dip." This proved to be the case now with Pestalozzi. He who had been an object of commiseration among philanthropic wiseacres, and the butt of every bad joke from the lips of the thoughtless and the unfeeling, was now extolled to the skies as the man of the age; and so high ran the tide of popularity in his favour, that he was chosen to be one of the deputies sent to Paris in 1802 pursuant to a proclamation of the French consul, in order to frame a new constitution which should unite the conflicting interests of Switzerland, and put a stop to its internal dissentions. The result of their labours was the Act of Mediation, which, while it secured the political independence of those parts of the country which had before the resolution been kept under the bondage of the domineering cantons, made a nearer approach to the ancient state of things by abolishing the central government and substituting in its place a diet, convoked annually, with limited powers. Being thus officially connected with the events of the day, Pestalozzi enlisted once more among the political writers, and embodied his views of the state of his country, and of the means of ameliorating it, in a pamphlet published under the title, "View of the Objects to which the Legislature of Switzerland has chiefly to direct its Attention." The liberal but moderate opinions to which he professed himself, and the

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