music teachers, who instructed my pupils, that purely instrumental music, such as that of the violin or of the pianoforte, is also in its essence based upon and derived from vocal music, though developed through the independent discovery of a few simple sound-producing instruments.  Not only have I never since left the path thus opened to me at its origin, but I have consistently traced it onwards in all care and love, and continue to rejoice in the excellent results obtained.  This course of music-teaching, as extended and applied later on, has always enjoyed the approbation of the thoughtful and experienced amongst music teachers.

I also studied the boys’ play, the whole series of games in the open air, and learned to recognise their mighty power to awake and to strengthen the intelligence and the soul as well as the body.  In these games and what was connected with them I detected the mainspring of the moral strength which animated the pupils and the young people in the institution.  The games, as I am now fervently assured, formed a mental bath of extraordinary strengthening-power;[71] and although the sense of the higher symbolic meaning of games had not yet dawned upon me, I was nevertheless able to perceive in each boy genuinely at play a moral strength governing both mind and body which won my highest esteem.

Closely akin to the games in their morally strengthening aspect were the walks, especially those of the general walking parties, more particularly when conducted by Pestalozzi himself.  These walks were by no means always meant to be opportunities for drawing close to Nature, but Nature herself, though unsought, always drew the walkers close to her.  Every contact with her elevates, strengthens, purifies.  It is from this cause that Nature, like noble great-souled men, wins us to her; and whenever school or teaching duties gave me respite, my life at this time was always passed amidst natural scenes and in communion with Nature.  From the tops of the high mountains near by I used to rejoice in the clear and still sunset, in the pine-forests, the glaciers, the mountain meadows, all bathed in rosy light.  Such an evening walk came indeed to be an almost irresistible necessity to me after each actively-spent day.  As I wandered on the sunlit, far-stretching hills, or along the still shore of the lake, clear as crystal, smooth as a mirror, or in the shady groves, under the tall forest trees, my spirit grew full with ideas of the truly god-like nature and priceless value of a man’s soul, and I gladdened myself with the consideration of mankind as the beloved children of God.  There is no question but that Pestalozzi’s general addresses, especially those delivered in the evening, when he used to delight in evoking a picture of noble manliness and true love of mankind and developing it in all its details, very powerfully contributed towards arousing such an inner life as that just described.