§ 50. Heroic efforts rise above the measurement of time. As Byron has said, “A thought is capable of years,” and it seldom happens that the nobleness of any human action depends on the time it lasts. Pestalozzi’s five months’ experiment at Stanz proved one of the most memorable events in the history of education. He was now completely satisfied that he saw his way to giving children a right education and “thus raising the beggar out of the dung-hill”; and seeing the right course he was urged by his love of the people into taking it. But how was he to set to work? His notions of school instruction differed entirely from those of the teaching profession; and even in the revolutionary age they had some reason for looking askance at this revolutionist. “He had everything against him,” we read, “thick, indistinct speech, bad writing, ignorance of drawing, scorn of grammatical learning. He had studied various branches of natural history, but without any particular attention either to classification or terminology. He was conversant with the ordinary operations in arithmetic, but he would have had difficulty in getting through a really long sum in multiplication or division; and he probably had never tried to work out a problem in geometry. For years this dreamer had read no books. But instead of the usual knowledge that any young man of ordinary talent can acquire in a year or two, he understood thoroughly what most masters were entirely ignorant of—the mind of man and the laws of its development, human affections and the art of arousing and ennobling them. He seemed to have almost an intuitive insight into the development of human nature, and was never tired of contemplating it.” (C. Monnard in R.’s Guimps, p. 174.)[157] § 51. This man wished to be a schoolmaster, but who would venture to entrust him with a school? No one seemed willing to do this; and he would have been at a loss where to turn had he not had influential friends at Burgdorf, a town not far from Bern. These got for him permission to teach, not indeed the children of burgesses but the children of non-burgesses, seventy-three of whom used to assemble under a shoemaker in his house in the suburbs. With this arrangement, however, the shoemaker and the parents of the children were by no means satisfied. “If the burgesses like the new method,” they said very reasonably, “let them try it on their own children.” Their grumbling was heard, and permission to teach was withdrawn from Pestalozzi.