“If your child’s to love and cherish Life that needs him day by day, Give him things to tend that perish If he ever stops away.”--_M., p. 84._ The child is “to feel within himself Nature’s close interdependence”: “Whenever opportunity occurs, make this inner dependence of life clear, visible, impressive, tangible and perceptible to your child, even though it be in only a few of the essential links of this great chain, until you come to the last ring that holds all the rest, God’s Father-love for all. The baker cannot bake if the miller brings him no flour, the miller can grind no flour if the farmer brings him no corn, the field can yield no crop if Nature does not work towards it in harmony, and Nature could not work in harmony if God had not placed in her power and material, and if His love did not guide everything to its fulfilment.”--_M., p. 148._ And again, as always, follows the need for expression of some kind. The children are not to be disturbed while they “say grace” over their doll’s feast. “It is no drawing down of the sacred into outer life; no, this is the germ which gives the outside actions of life the inner meaning and higher consecration, which life so much needs. For how is your child to cultivate innocently in himself a lively feeling for what is holy, if you will not grant that it takes form for him even in his innocent games.”--_M., p. 148._ It may be as well before leaving the subject to notice here one or two other points in connection with feeling that are touched upon by Froebel. Though, as we have seen[23], the feeling side is always kept in closest connection with those of knowledge and action, yet the fundamental importance of the emotional side is stated quite distinctly. The child is “living, loving and perceiving,” or “creating, feeling and thinking,” still: “The cultivation of boyhood rests wholly on that of childhood; therefore activity and firmness of the will rest upon activity and firmness of the feelings and of the heart. Where the latter are lacking, the former will scarcely be attainable.”--_E., p. 97._ This is put more strongly in connection with the child’s imitation of the music of the bell note, the “bim-baum” or “ding-dong” sung by the mother, while she swings the ball to and fro, which according to Froebel “serves the emotional side.” “The children thus early and definitely point out that the centre, the real foundation, the starting-point of human development is the heart and the emotions, but the training to action and thought, the corporeal and mental, goes on constantly and inseparably by the side of it; and thought must form itself into action, and action resolve and clear itself in thought; but both have their roots in the emotional nature.”--_P., p. 42._