Froebel’s opinions, character, and work grow so directly out of his life, that we feel the best of his writing that a student of the Kindergarten system could begin with is the important autobiographical “Letter to the Duke of Meiningen,” written in the year 1827, but never completed, and in all probability never sent to the sovereign whose name it bears.  That this is the course Froebel would himself have preferred will, we think, become quickly apparent to the reader.  Besides, in the boyhood and the earliest experiences of Froebel’s life, we find the sources of his whole educational system.  That other children might be better understood than he was, that other children might have the means to live the true child-life that was denied to himself, and that by their powers being directed into the right channels, these children might become a blessing to themselves and to others, was undoubtedly in great part the motive which induced Froebel to describe so fully all the circumstances of his peculiar childhood.  We should undoubtedly have a clearer comprehension of many a great reformer if he had taken the trouble to write out at length the impressions of his life’s dawn, as Froebel has done.  In Froebel’s particular case, moreover, it is evident that although his account of himself is unfinished, we fortunately possess all that is most important for the understanding of the origin of the Kindergarten system.  After the “Letter to the Duke of Meiningen,” we have placed the shorter account of his life which Froebel included in a letter to the philosopher Krause.  A sketch of Barop’s, which varies the point of view by regarding the whole movement more in its outer aspect than even Froebel himself is able to do, seemed to us also desirable to translate; and finally we have added also a carefully prepared “chronology” extended from Lange’s list.  Our translation is made from the edition of Froebel’s works published by Dr. Wichard Lange at Berlin in 1862.

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sp;                                             EMILIE MICHAELIS. 
                                                       H. KEATLEY MOORE. 
THE CROYDON KINDERGARTEN,
January 1886.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FROEBEL.

(A LETTER TO THE DUKE OF MEININGEN.)

I was born at Oberweissbach, a village in the Thuringian Forest, in the small principality of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, on the 21st April, 1782.  My father was the principal clergyman, or pastor, there.[1] (He died in 1802.) I was early initiated into the conflict of life amidst painful and narrowing circumstances; and ignorance of child-nature and insufficient education wrought their influence upon me.  Soon after my birth my mother’s health began to fail, and after nursing me nine months she died.  This loss, a hard blow to me, influenced the whole environment and development of my being:  I consider that my mother’s death decided more or less the external circumstances of my whole life.