“Man, too, would express the thoughts and feelings that are awakened in him and for which he cannot find words, and these should be given him.… the thoughtful teacher can easily interpret the thoughts and feelings of the boys, as well as the phases of Nature, in living fitting words.… In general, all that was said concerning the appropriation of religious expressions is true here.”--_E., p. 267._ Froebel had also noted even thus early how “the natural mother” from the very beginning cultivates feeling through expression, through gesture or action. “Mother love seeks to awaken and to interpret the feeling of community between the child and the father, brother and sister, when she says, ‘Dear Daddy!’ as she caressingly passes the child’s hand over the father’s cheek. ‘Love daddy, love little sister,’ etc.”--_E., p. 69._ In the Mother’s Songs, written much later and after Froebel had made careful observation of young children, he is more emphatic, and his ideas of expression are both wider and more definite. In “The Education of Man” he had said that literature exercises and tests judgment and feelings, and he had added that this should be followed up by some constructive action. But now he knows that feeling when stirred ought to express itself in actual service, just as James suggests “speaking genially to one’s grandmother, or giving up one’s seat in a horse car, if nothing more heroic offers.” The mother is told that at first she should help her little one to understand her care of him and his dependence on her by “the looking-glass of outer life,” by letting him, for instance, watch the hen caring for her chickens, and the parent birds feeding and brooding over their young in the nest. In the rhymed motto of “The Nest” she is told: “Already the baby likes to see pictures showing the loving care of a mother. Let him do so often, that his life experience may become clear to him.” But the longer explanation has an important addition: “The way lies through our imaginative, tender and emotional observation of Nature and of man’s life, and through the child’s affectionately taking their most intimate meaning into the life of his own heart, _and expressing by representation what he thus takes in_.”--_M., p. 149._ So, as the child begins to realize what he owes, comes the next little play, “The Flower Basket,” the key-note of which is given in its motto: “Try to let the child give outward form to what stirs his feelings, for the love even of a child dies away if not carefully fostered.”--_M., p. 38._